Family Colors

It sounds like pure soap opera: A woman on the verge of marriage to one man is pursued by another, while some members of her family fume that the impending nuptials will be a catastrophe.

But what makes ABC’s “The Wedding” different from a standard-issue plot on “Melrose Place” or “Beverly Hills, 90210” is that most of the key characters are African American. And the issues that divide them on the brink of an interracial marriage in 1953 fall not only along traditional black-and-white fault lines, but also along the less-seldom discussed stratification between dark-skinned and light-skinned blacks.

Halle Berry, who stars in the drama, believes “The Wedding” has universal appeal. “Just change the names and the faces and [anyone] will be able to relate to it as well,” says the actress, whose credits include “The Flintstones” and “Losing Isaiah.”

“It’s not just a race thing, but a class thing,” agrees director Charles Burnett (“Nightjohn”). “That’s where the universal elements came in. Those were the attitudes and themes we were focusing on.”

Set in an exclusive African American community on Martha’s Vineyard, “The Wedding” is based on Dorothy West’s acclaimed novel and is airing under the “Oprah Winfrey Presents” banner, which premiered last fall with “Before Women Had Wings” and received good ratings. Winfrey is executive producer but doesn’t appear in the film.

Berry plays Shelby Coles, the light-skinned daughter of a socially prominent, wealthy African American family who is defying convention by planning to marry Mead (Eric Thal), a struggling, white jazz musician.

Lynn Whitfield portrays Shelby’s mother, Corinne, an undemonstrative woman who feels her daughter is marrying beneath her social standing. A few years earlier, her older daughter, Liz (Cynda Williams), eloped after Corinne made it clear that the too-dark, working-class parents of her fiance (Richard Brooks) would not be welcomed to the wedding.

One person who is eager Shelby marry a white man is her great-grandmother (Shirley Knight), the 98-year-old Southern white matriarch of the family. Her daughter had married a former slave from her father’s plantation; now Gram hopes each generation of the family will be lighter than the next.

Carl Lumbly also stars as Lute, a dark-skinned African American who is considered an outsider by the Martha Vineyard’s community but nonetheless has his sights set on wooing Shelby away from her fiance.

Berry, who played the title role of a mixed-race slave in the 1993 CBS miniseries “Queen,” says she got involved in the project after appearing on Winfrey’s talk show.

“She said she would love for me to play Shelby and would I read the book?,” Berry recalls. ‘After I read the book I was inspired. I sort of got educated. I didn’t learn about these people in history class, so I felt immediately [that] this would be a great educational tool for people like myself. . . . [It was also a chance] to understand my heritage a little bit better.”

Berry says coming from an interracial family herself--her mother was white, her father black--gave her a “certain sensitivity” to the color issues in the drama. “I just know certain things about being in that situation,” she says.

“But my experience was so different than Queen’s or Shelby’s,” she adds. “I grew up with a very liberal, opened-minded mother who said, ‘Bring home whoever you want.’ But the struggle to fit in and to find my own identity--that is very much what I went through in my life. Sure, I was interracial and kids didn’t understand--’Why is your mommy white and you’re not?’--but I don’t think it was any more traumatic than the next kid with a problem. Mine was just different.”

Unlike Berry, Shelby was sheltered by her parents from the world outside their community. “They were trying to live in this idealized place,” says Berry. “It wasn’t happening, as hard as the family tried to make it in this special, magical place. In the end, Shelby says how proud she was that she was the first one to be free enough to make a choice and change the pattern, sort of break the mold. That speaks to the power of the new generation and how important it is for young people today to make their own decisions and not be victims of what their parents believed or what they thought.”

The color issues depicted in the film still exists in the African American community today, says director Burnett, who is black. “I don’t think it is as bad,” he says. “I know in Atlanta and places like that, it’s still a phenomenon. But with ‘Black is Beautiful’ in the ‘60s and ‘70s, that helped erode a lot of that stuff. But it still exists. It’s sort of ingrained.”

“It permeates the culture in a strange way,” adds Knight, who found it fascinating to play the only white member of the family.

“I remember years ago, Muhammad Ali was on television and he was saying there is something about light and dark--that we associate darkness as something bad and lightness as something good. He said, witness things like [the fact that] dark cake is devil’s food cake, but white cake is called angel’s food cake. I found that fascinating.”

Both Berry and Burnett believe there are no villains in the piece. “I never looked at it in terms of good and bad guys,” Burnett explains. “I looked at it in terms of people with their own dilemmas and problems they are trying to work out. We were trying to make these people as human as possible and as well-rounded and fully dimensional.”

The matriarch character, Berry explains, is “a product of her environment and her time. That’s all that it is.”

“She didn’t know any better,” adds Knight. “And she sort of redeems herself at the end.”

With “The Wedding,” Burnett says, “I tried to alter people’s awareness of a black family. This is a family and they are not on drugs or committing crimes. It’s a different type of tension and drama.”

“Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.