Drama Rooted in a Privileged Family Tree

The smartly dressed young African American with the trumpet has an opening speech about wanting his music “to hide where I came from and to hide who I am.” What cannot be guessed from those words alone, however, is that Reuben Clark, the engaging fellow in Charles Randolph-Wright’s memory play-with-music, is not running from a life we know by heart from the usual mean streets of stage and screen.

Not even close. Instead, our guide through “Blue,” the ungainly but engrossing melodrama that opened off-Broadway Thursday at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Gramercy Theatre, is fleeing a privileged life in an upscale family-owned funeral business in a semi-fictional town in South Carolina. Just because the Clarks made the cover of Ebony’s issue about prominent families, however, should not deny Reuben his claim to heartache.

Although “Blue” is told from Reuben’s perspective, it is a play with heartaches and affection for the entire family. The motor behind all conflict and joy is Reuben’s mother, Peggy, a restless woman stuck in backwater riches after a life as a model in Chicago. Phylicia Rashad, defined for years as Bill Cosby’s TV wife, finds even more dimensions as yet another upper-middle-class black woman of stature and unpredictable goals. Despite unbearable pretensions and demands on her two sons, Rashad’s Peggy somehow keeps drawing us back to compassion for her mixed emotions.

You see, Peggy is obsessed with the music of Blue Williams, a soul-pop sensation whose records are an integral part of the education of young Reuben (Chad Tucker) and the inspiration of grown-up Reuben--a star-making performance by the appealing Hill Harper. Blue’s music is sung, live, by Michael McElroy, a smoothie who appears in blue lights from the shadows of the tall blue doors in James Leonard Joy’s aptly upscale and starkly ostentatious mausoleum of a living room set.

Sheldon Epps, the artistic director at Pasadena Playhouse who directed much the same cast last year at Molly Smith’s revitalized Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., has found a delightful way of melding the family drama’s naturalistic style with the music. The songs, with music by Nona Hendryx, formerly a singer with Labelle, has just the right slick romanticism, if only her lyrics, written with Randolph-Wright, could resist the pull into the banal.

Otherwise, the evening has a fresh, fascinating sense of its identity. Aside from the superb Harper and Rashad, the strong cast includes Jewell Robinson as Peggy’s irreverent mother-in-law, Howard W. Overshown as a husband who understands exactly why he puts up with his wife’s airs, Messeret Stroman as the saucy girl from the wrong side of the tracks and Randall Sheppard as Reuben’s rebel brother with dreams forever deferred.

Yes, the songs have a lot of cornball stuff about dreams and the winds that blow your way, or not. And, yes, there are elements of Warren Leight’s jazz-family play “Side Man,” and newly trendy echoes of “Six Feet Under,” HBO’s new series about a dysfunctional family of undertakers. Still, Randolph-Wright lifts his characters out of any threat of stereotype with wit, specificity and an honest sense of purpose. There are secrets in the soul and dead people in the limo. Peggy wants everything to be “divine,” but, sometimes, a good heart is enough.

*

* “Blue.” By Charles Randolph-Wright, directed by Sheldon Epps. Sets by James Leonard Joy, costumes by Debra Bauer, lights by Michael Gilliam, music by Nona Hendryx, lyrics by Hendryx and Randolph-Wright. Roundabout Theatre Company, Gramercy Theatre, 23rd Street west of Lexington Avenue, Manhattan.

Linda Winer is Newsday’s chief theater critic.