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Jackson, performed off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in May. “God sent Tyler on Earth to be our voice, along with Barack,” she intones. Her favorite thing about his talent is that maybe he’ll use it to write a Tyler Perry show. His mother, played by a goateed man, disapproves of his art, his sexuality and his taste. It’s about an aspiring playwright who’s miserably gay, unhappily black and stuck in a dull job (as a theater usher) that’s keeping him from a life of creating musicals. The show is “A Strange Loop,” a ferocious, pungent Off Broadway hit from the summer. Jackson, who built a musical around black people’s love of Perry and his own contempt for Perry’s work. If you were a kid, teenager or barely an adult in the 2000s, living in a black city and attracted to the stage, it would be hard for Perry not to become someone to revere, reckon with or resist. He’s the biggest black playwright in America. Didn’t see that coming? Maybe it’s not immediately obvious. If these disputes are musty (I, at least, can smell mold), they’re also moot, because right now a circle of young black playwrights is doing some of the most imaginative, confrontational work in the American theater, and Perry is right there at its center. Is he good for black people? Is he good at all? ( A displeased review I wrote of the film version of “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” garnered ticked-off mail for years, from people certain that my not liking it meant I had to be white.) Do his plays, movies and cable sitcoms - with their bawdy cartoon carnality, billboard-size lessons, one-dimensional religiosity, rickety domestic partnerships, vituperative socioeconomic clashes, scams and vociferous, flamboyant blackness - qualify as art? (For the record, they do.)
This cacophony of flat acting and exuberance, as well as the fact of his popularity, have started fights among both critics and civilians about Perry’s merits. Somebody’s mad, somebody’s cheating, somebody’s dying, somebody’s scheming.
They’re not exactly parables, musicals or church, either. They aren’t quite farces, dramas or melodramas. These are loud, long, hysterical shows in which a bunch of characters, not infrequently on a set resembling a sitcom diorama, love and leave one another, imparting morals the way a shot gets put. There are black people for whom a Tyler Perry show would be a night out and maybe their annual (or very first) trip to the theater. Even more saw them somewhere else, like in a barber’s chair. His clamored-for stage tours built an empire off Madea’s back - “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” “Madea’s Class Reunion,” “Madea Goes to Jail,” “Madea Gets a Job.” 2 Lots of people saw them live. But before he was one of America’s most successful entertainers, Perry was a star in black America. Over 15 years, Perry has written, directed, acted in and produced more than 20 films of his own and has appeared in other people’s, too 1 (that’s him as Colin Powell in “Vice”). Depending on how often your hair needs tending and who’s tending it, Madea could be a regular, involuntary part of your life, like secondhand smoke or traffic. Her name is Mabel Simmons, although most people know her as Madea, the elderly vulgarian synonymous with Tyler Perry, who since 1999 has been wearing her gray wig and flowery housedresses. It can entail some waiting and, perhaps, a few old Ebony magazines or some televised ambience: sports news, one of those Saturday-afternoon cooking shows or, maybe most entertaining, a bootleg DVD of a stage play in which a broad-shouldered, square-jawed 6-foot-6 linebacker of a woman counsels, threatens, mocks and manhandles strangers, neighbors and kin. Getting your hair done, cut or installed is a routine event.