In grand style, Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre Company inaugurated the new, 375-seat performance theater at Fulton County's Southwest Arts Center.
Open since November, its casual gala Wednesday drew a range of local power brokers and celebrities, from the National Black Arts Festival's Stephanie Hughley to basketball hero Julius Erving.
In the coming year, the theater will lure some of the area's most esteemed groups — Ballethnic Dance, Center for Puppetry Arts, the NBAF — to an area of the city that had long been underserved by the fine arts.
Directed by Leon, the opening event is David Feldshuh's disturbing, wry, sentimental "Miss Evers' Boys," which premiered in 1992.
The play is based on the infamous "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," a 40-year government program that is one of the most shameful episodes in modern American history.
Leaked to the press only in 1972, the study's legacy continues to fuel conspiracy theories and assumptions about the U.S. government and its treatment of African-Americans.
In True Color's production, the acting was alert and compelling, with Leon's stage direction wise, sometimes funny, often enlightening. In one wretchedly painful scene, nothing graphic happens but Leon's staging is so powerful that half the audience was seen to wince and squirm.
We start with Jasmine Guy as Nurse Evers, scraggly but proud as an old woman, testifying before the U.S. Senate. In an instant she transforms into a radiant, idealistic nurse who initially sees the study as aid to her people, a quartet of Alabama sharecroppers in 1932.
Each man has been tested positive for "bad blood." There's Caleb (E. Roger Mitchell), shrewd with a silver tongue; Ben (Eugene Lee), a sweet older man; Willie (Eric J. Little) a charismatic dancer with ambition; and Hodman (Enoch King), an expert at (comic) folk remedies.
They've formed a winning scat-and-dance band, and take their nurse's name for the group. But after the widespread introduction of penicillin in 1947, when Dr. John Douglas (Bart Hansard, who is white) and Dr. Eugene Brodus (T.C. Carson, who is black) decide to deny the men effective treatment, the study shifts from unethical to criminal.
Knowing the men could be helped, Nurse Evers nevertheless continues to assert her loyalty to them, even as they're racked with pain, disbelief and, the play's take-home mood, anger.
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