‘Wedding’ Deftly Tackles Complex Questions of Color

“In order to understand who you are, you have to understand where you’re from,” Shelby Coles, the primary character in “Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding,” says near the start of the two-part ABC drama.

The phrase could serve as a leitmotif for the complex, generation-crossing picture, which is based on the best-selling Dorothy West novel “The Wedding.”

The central event in the story--which takes place on Martha’s Vineyard in 1953--is the upcoming wedding between Coles and Meade Howell, a jazz pianist. But the plans are complicated by the fact that Coles (played with great subtlety by Halle Berry) comes from a wealthy, upper-class black family, and Howell (thoughtfully portrayed by Eric Thal) is a poor white musician with questionable financial prospects.

Shelby and her wealthy parents (played with depth and understanding by Lynn Whitfield and Michael Warren) live in a grand house in the “Oval” area of Martha’s Vineyard, a community that makes definitions of skin color beyond the primaries of black and white, in which light is more acceptable than dark. In fact, Shelby’s great-grandmother, Gram, the matriarch of the family (in a virtuosic performance by Shirley Knight), is white, the daughter of a slave owner, and determined that each generation of the family be lighter than the last.

The story is further complicated by the arrival of Lute McNeil (intensely rendered by Carl Lumbly) in the neighborhood. An attractive, charismatic black man with dark skin, he is fascinated by Shelby and takes every opportunity to obstruct her wedding plans.

As the 10 days before the wedding gradually unfold, further issues of color become apparent, and Shelby is forced to understand--in her own words--”where you’re from.”

This large, complex but compelling canvas of events becomes even more multilayered with the addition of extended flashback segments reaching over four generations. Sometimes initially confusing, they nonetheless serve to illuminate the family issues that have become focused upon Shelby in the days preceding her planned marriage.

Ultimately, the disparate threads of emotion untangle in a conclusion that reveals that “The Wedding” is about more than color, even though it does not hesitate to confront that issue--in both the black and the white communities--in considerable detail.

But at the heart of the story, “The Wedding” is also about love, personal identity and--perhaps above all--family, and the capacity for healing that can exist in the most troubled relationships.

Lisa Jones’ script does a yeomanlike job of maintaining logic and continuity in a tale that stretches from the late 1800s to the mid-20th century. And executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Kate Forte have not stinted in providing the picture with a convincing look and feel for each of the story’s time segments.

* “Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-PG (may not be suitable for young viewers).