Oscar Brown Jr.--the Play’s His Thing

Oscar Brown Jr. may be the most hyphenated figure in show business: poet-singer-songwriter-actor-playwright-producer director-lyricist (add your own hyphens). His biography reads like a scattershot history of moderate hits, near misses, flops, fits and starts, mainly in the area of writing and staging musical shows.

But for a man once described as a genius of the theater by such disparate observers as Lorraine Hansberry, Steve Allen, Nina Simone, Max Roach and Nat Hentoff, he seems never quite to have lived up to the potential he showed when those accolades were showered on him in the early 1960s.

“I have a show right now,” Brown said the other day in a call from Chicago, “that would be perfect for a movie. It’s called ‘Great Nitty Gritty’ and it played in Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee. . . . It’s about Jean DuSable, the black man who was the first settler here. A statue of him comes to life, and some kids are having a gang war, and this victim of a shooting has to assist him in peacemaking. . . .”

As Brown (who is at the Vine St. Bar & Grill through Saturday) tells the story of his project, the mind’s eye goes back to all the other plays over the decades, and to the one central fact: that none ever became a Broadway hit. The best remembered is “Kicks & Co.,” mainly because the late Dave Garroway turned his entire NBC-TV show one morning into a virtual backers’ audition. Though $400,000 was raised, it ran for just four nights in Chicago and died. Asked whether this was his biggest disappointment, Brown hesitated, then replied: “Well, it was my first. There were quite a number. But that’s show business.”

There were many other shows, most of them impressions of black history and Afro-American life. Brown has always had a vital social and political consciousness; he ran for the Illinois Legislature in 1948 and for Congress in 1952 and lost both times, but remained active in the labor movement and in socially significant writing.

Ironically, he feels that some of his most valuable work in the theater was done because he had time on his hands. With the singer Jean Pace, who was his personal and professional partner for 25 years (they are no longer together), he co-directed “Opportunity Please Knock” in conjunction with the Mighty Blackstone Rangers, a notorious Chicago street gang. The show led to a temporary break in gang warfare on Chicago’s South Side and earned national attention when the cast was presented on the Smothers Brothers show in 1968.

A few of his shows had reasonably good runs: “Joy ‘66,” in Chicago, followed by “Joy ‘69,” which ran for a total of a year in San Francisco, New York and Chicago. But the only show to make it to Broadway, “Buck White,” after a long engagement in San Francisco, opened on Broadway with Muhammad Ali in the title role and closed after a week.

More recently Brown wrote a trilogy of verse plays based on the book of Genesis: “In the Beginning,” “Raisin’ Cain,” and “Covenants.” “I’m bringing all this stuff with me to Hollywood,” he says. “I still have a lot of scripts waiting for Hollywood and Broadway.”

Between plays there has been no shortage of work. His one-man show was acclaimed in Europe and around the United States. In 1982, he hosted “Jumpstreet, the Story of Black Music,” a 13-week series on PBS. When the theatrical stages were less than hospitable, there were always the nightclubs: In 1986 he presented “Sliced Apple,” a cabaret-style musical, at a jazz supper club in Lower Manhattan.

There are always the songs, too; Brown has written hundreds. The best known are “Brown Baby” (written in 1950 after the birth of his first son and recorded by Mahalia Jackson, Diahann Carroll and Lena Horne, among others); “Dat Dere,” a lyric to a Bobby Timmons jazz instrumental, and possibly his biggest hit, the words to Nat Adderley’s “Work Song.” He also wrote some lyrics to Miles Davis’ “All Blues” but claims to have received no royalties.

For the Vine Street gig, he is being backed by a pianist and by his 31-year-old son, Oscar III, on bass.

At 61, he is philosophical about that big stage hit that still lurks around the corner. “The only problem seems to be,” he says, “that Broadway just won’t take yes for an answer.”