A Free Man of Color (review)

John Guare's A Free Man of Color celebrates human potential. Set in a small part of the world struggling against the civilizing forces of "order" and "control" Guare's play is nonetheless sufficiently expansive to fill the Vivian Beaumont stage, where the production reminded me of both the carnivalesque explosiveness of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and the high metatheatricality of plays like Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good. A Free Man of Color not only celebrates self-invention and sensual indulgence as the characters embrace mutability, chance, and materiality, but also undermines the life-limiting constrictions of order, civilization, and law. Imbued with life-embracing vitality, this brilliant production created a sort of three-ring circus of continuous action.

The play is set in New Orleans during the early nineteenth century, a time when Spanish, African, French, British, and US influences were all vying for the soul of what one character called "the free-est city in the world." This production's colorful open set, scattered with representative portable props, propelled the play from one imaginative locale to another: from marketplace to bedchamber; from a planter's home to a riverfront haunt; and even to Napoleon's bathroom. With an ornate proscenium arch erected as backdrop, the set befitted the theatrical nature of the play and the rococo extravagance of colonial New Orleans. Against this background, director George C. Wolfe created a colorful New Orleans antithetical to the Yankee restraint of cities like Boston during the same period. The result was a feeling of openness and endless possibility, a world of opportunity for independent men of adventure and spirit, and a place of personal invention where "you can be whatever you declare yourself to be." The play's central character, Jacques Cornet, is just such a man, a free man of color who declares to the audience his intention to create his own character and write his own play. In essence, the main character writes the play (Cornet initially titles it The Happy Life of a Man in Power), and this city of multivalent influences is his fertile site of self-invention.

Jeffrey Wright (Jacques Cornet) in A Free Man of Color. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.)

In this world-premiere production, Jeffrey Wright played Cornet with the larger-than-life expansiveness that the role demands, assuming the mantel of Lord of Misrule and using his wit, sexual magnetism, and full-bodied appetite to mesmerize those characters around him. As master of self-invention and author of the play in front of us, Wright's Cornet mastered the stage like a circus ringmaster, trumpeting orders and directing attention to various corners of the spotlighted stage, where the many vignettes added up to the story of Cornet in New Orleans. Wright mastered the surface arts of appearance and seduction in a manner reminiscent of the Restoration rake, after which his character is clearly modeled. In fact, Cornet knew the stratagems used by Horner in William Wycherley's The Country Wife and literally assumed the disguise and masterful deception of his English namesake. This—Guare's most obvious reference to the libertine excesses of the Restoration world—admirably captured its comic legacy, and Wright masterfully translated eighteenth-century theatricality to the modern stage.

Director Wolfe set the pace, moving the play along expeditiously in the best tradition of the comedy of manners. Seduction plots interwove political intrigue, unbridled buffoonery (Napoleon appeared several times in a bathtub scrubbing himself like a child while ranting about world domination), a chorus of prostitutes, a comically caricatured Spanish king and infanta, a wily manservant, and several insanely impotent captains of industry tricked like Keystone cops at every turn. It wasn't all fun and games, however. Wolfe's comic devices generated more than laughter; incorporated within them were instances of cruel injustice and hypocrisy among the ruling classes. Guare depicted these dissipated masters of their domain as purely...