Madea's Big Scholarly Roundtable to Examine the Media of Tyler Perry at Northwestern University

Madea's Big Scholarly Roundtable to Examine the Media of Tyler Perry at Northwestern University

Northwestern University’s Block Cinema and department of radio/TV/film organize panel discussion

A Nov. 28 daylong symposium of film screenings and discussion will explore African-American media mogul Tyler Perry’s work.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- A daylong symposium of film screenings and discussion about the work of actor, director, screenwriter, playwright and producer Tyler Perry -- who is known for creating and performing in drag the cantankerous character of Mabel “Madea” Simmons in his feature films -- will be held on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus in late November. 

While the African-American media mogul’s 2012 film “Alex Cross,” about a homicide detective “who is pushed to the brink of moral and physical limits” may have disappointed at the box office, Perry remains a powerful force in Hollywood. Each of the 13 films Perry has produced since 2002 have enjoyed opening weekends with top earnings. The writer-producer-director-actor also continues to produce the wildly popular gospel stage plays that constitute his show business origins, while at the same time overseeing two commercial cable sitcoms.

The Tyler Perry symposium will be hosted by Northwestern’s Block Cinema and the School of Communication’s department of radio/TV/film.

“Madea’s Big Scholarly Roundtable: Perspectives on the Media of Tyler Perry,” Wednesday, Nov. 28, includes a panel discussion as well as film screenings with moderated conversations. All events take place on the University’s Evanston campus and are free and open to the public.

• “Madea’s Family Reunion” will be screened at 9:30 a.m. and “The Family That Preys” at 1 p.m., at Annie May Swift Auditorium, 1920 Campus Drive.

• The panel discussion on Perry’s work begins at 5 p.m. at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive

“This program marks a turn toward serious academic consideration of Perry’s media that has been a long time in coming, but is nonetheless right on time,” said Miriam Petty, assistant professor of radio/TV/film and African American studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the organizer of the symposium and moderator of the panel.

“For someone like me, who is interested in Hollywood film as well as African-American popular culture, the complexities and contradictions inherent in what Perry does and how he does it make his work compelling to discuss, study and think and write about,” said Petty.

Featured panelists will consider Perry’s extensive body of work from a variety of perspectives, exploring such topics as his theatrical roots, the influence of the African- American church on his work, the highbrow/lowbrow tensions his works stir up, and the ways that class, region, gender and sexuality are reflected in his screen and stage productions and in discussions of Perry himself.

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Moderator: Miriam Petty (Assistant Professor, Departments of Radio/TV/Film and of African American Studies, Northwestern University)

Participants:

Mark Anthony Neal (Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African-American Studies, Duke University)

Racquel Gates (Assistant Professor, Department of Media Culture, CUNY College of Staten Island)

Daniel O. Black (Novelist; Professor of English, Clark-Atlanta University)

Brittney Cooper (Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies & Africana Studies, Rutgers University)

E. Patrick Johnson (Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies, Northwestern University)

Madea’s Big Scholarly Roundtable is co-sponsored by Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Block Cinema, the black arts initiative, departments of radio/television/film, African American studies and performance studies, School of Communication, Center for Screen Cultures, Screen Cultures Program and Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Free parking is available during the panel discussion portion of the symposium. For more information, call (847) 491-4000 or visit blockmuseum.northwestern.edu.

Baratunde Thurston - On Tyler Perry and The Future of Black Film

from ReelBlack

Author and comedian BARATUNDE THURSTON shares his thoughts on the state of popular African-American film and his hopes for the future. His new memoir, HOW TO BE BLACK is available now from Harper Collins.

'Left of Black' S2:E4 w/ Julie Dash & Lizz Wright

Left of Black S2:E4

w/ Julie Dash & Lizz Wright

October 3, 2011

Filmmaker Julie Dash joins host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal on Left of Black.  This year marks the 20^th Anniversary of the release of Dash’s ground-breaking film Daughters of the Dust which was the first feature by an African-American woman to gain national theatrical release.   The film draws on Dash's South Carolina heritage and focuses on three generations of women with roots in the Sea Islands and Gullah culture. Dash discusses how she became a filmmaker and the challenges she faced along the way.  Dash also reveals her surprising view of filmmaker Tyler Perry. 

In the second segment, musical artist and vocalist Lizz Wright joins Neal.  The Georgia born singer discusses how her family’s tradition in storytelling inspired her career as a vocalist.  Wright, whose music is difficult to place in one genre, talks about incorporating religion into her music as well.  Wright also identifies the musicians who influenced her and the inspiration her album artwork.  Finally Wright explains how she’s maintained control of her music.  Wright has released four full-length recordings, including the recent Fellowship.  She performs at Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater on October 7^th.

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Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

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Episodes of Left of Black are also available for download @ iTunes U

Am I The Only Feminist Who Liked Perry’s “For Colored Girls”?

Am I The Only Feminist Who Liked Perry’s “For Colored Girls”?
by Janell Hobson

I doubt that I am, and judging from the mostly black female audience that filled the theater where I watched Tyler Perry’s film adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s celebrated “choreopoem,” I believe the word-of-mouth among black women is that Perry got more things right than wrong in presenting the classic narrative on black women’s blues.

Other Ms. reviewers, such as Mako Fitts and Linda Villarosa, point out some crucial problems with Perry’s take–from homophobia to a conservative dismissal of positive black female sexuality to a simplistic portrayal of black men. Over at The Root, Salamisha Tillet argues that Perry severely undermines black feminism through his negative portrayal of Janet Jackson’s character, Jo, a black professional woman.

I can’t help but wonder, though, at the chorus of critics not previously invested in black feminist issues who gave the film overwhelming negative reviews. From Roger Ebert to the early reviews offered in Variety and Hollywood Reporter to Courtland Milloy who wishes to speak “for black men who have considered homicide” after watching the movie, reviewers have condemned the film as “cluttered,” “man-hating” and a “train wreck.”

What none of the critics–feminist or otherwise–pointed out was the transformation that occurred when Perry grounded the abstract poetry of Shange in cinematic realism. On-stage monologues about secret abortions and abuse allow us to go with our imaginations and feel the poems, but seeing these scenes through candid film shots was downright traumatizing. Whatever art and lyricism are conveyed in poetry, there is nothing like the gritty reality of the motion picture. While Shange’s words offer great humor and great pain, along with rainbows and rhythmic movements in jazz and salsa, Perry’s adaptation goes a step further by transporting the dance and the words into concrete scenarios played by concrete characters with names, addresses, relatives, partners and careers.

Read the the Full Essay @ Ms. Blog

For Colored Boys Who Have Survived Sexual Abuse, Is “For Colored Girls” Enuf?

For Colored Boys Who Have Survived Sexual Abuse, Is “For Colored Girls” Enuf?
by Jennifer Williams

On November 5, Oprah Winfrey aired the first of a two-part episode on male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Two hundred men stood in the audience, each holding a photograph taken at the age their innocence was stolen by the priest, babysitter, or parent who molested them. Filmmaker Tyler Perry was among them, just two weeks after he had shared his childhood experiences with physical and sexual abuse for the first time with a television audience on Oprah.

Perry initially disclosed his abuse last year in a lengthy letter he addressed to his fans and posted on his website. In the letter, Perry revealed that viewing Lee Daniels’ Precious, a film based on Sapphire’s novel Push, triggered a series of traumatic memories from his childhood, including being brutally beaten numerous times by his father, raped by his friend’s mother and molested by a male church member. Like the character Precious, he said, he used his imagination to escape his body.

Perry’s appearances on Oprah coincide with the release of his film For Colored Girls, adapted from Ntozake Shange’s 1975 Obie award-winning play. Perry’s recent airing of his childhood sexual abuse also comes on the heels of several other black men publicly coming out of the closet about childhood sexual abuse.

Read the Full Essay @ Ms. Blog

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Jennifer Williams is a writer and professor of English at New York University. She blogs at "for colored girls who drink cosmos when suicide seems to gauche."

'Left of Black': Episode #9 featuring Joan Morgan & Sofia Quintero

Left of Black'--Episode # 9
w/Mark Anthony Neal
Monday, November 15, 2010

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Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal discusses the controversy over Tyler Perry’s big screen adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls and surviving the Bronx, New York with writers Joan Morgan and Sofia Quintero.

-->Joan Morgan is the author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip Hop Feminist and a founding contributor to Vibe Magazine.

-->Sofia Quintero is the author of several novels including Explicit Content, Picture Me Rollin’ and most recently, Efrain’s Secret, her first young adult novel.

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Also available for download from iTunes U Here

For Colored Girls: A Town Hall Gathering

For Colored Girls

A Town Hall Meeting
w/ the Department of African & African-American Studies

featuring Professors

Wahneema Lubiano
Tarshia Stanley
William "Sandy" Darity
Maurice Wallace
Jennifer Brody
Mark Anthony Neal


November 16, 2010 | 7:00 PM
The Mary Lou Williams Center
Duke University
919.684.3814

For Colored Girls, Is Tyler Perry's Film Enuf?

For Colored Girls, Is Tyler Perry's Film Enuf?
Courtney Young | November 12, 2010

What is the price paid when a director widely considered to be anti-feminist interprets a beloved black feminist text for film? Can a piece as endearing as Ntozake Shange's 1975 classic choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Not Enuf reach its full cinematic potential outside the hands of a black female director? When movie mogul Tyler Perry first announced he would be reviving the celebrated text for the screen, many fans of the original production reacted with dismay, worry, even anger. A deft combination of poetry, music and movement, the choreopoem gives life to the voices of seven unnamed women distinguished on stage only by a singular color of dress. The piece allows each woman to relay her story frankly, at times through a collective narration, airing a host of issues that affect black women's lives—rape, abortion, domestic abuse and child murder, but also love, sex, and friendship. Would the complexity of black women's lives and voices survive in Perry's hands?

Before the film even hit theatres on November 5, reviews were running the gamut. At The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt eviscerated the film [1] as "too crude and stagy for Shange's transformative evocation of black female life." New York magazine's David Edelstein [2] excoriated Perry's translation, concluding, "He has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle…cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the Precious ante." But not all reviewers found the film to be an unmitigated disaster. Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University, writing for The Loop, asserts that [3], "The film's commercial success marks one of the visible moments for mainstream Black Feminism, within a national culture that has been largely ignorant of Black feminist writing and art."

The $20.1 million raked in over opening weekend undoubtedly makes Perry's first R-rated film a financial success. But its initial popularity in no way mitigates Perry's ultimate transgression, committed by so many when adapting classic works: failing to present the characters as they are, rather than as he wants them to be. Perry's refusal to stretch the boundaries of black female expression, which is key to Shange's text, beyond the scope of his own familiarity indicts his direction.

A number of recurring themes inform or, at times, dictate the actions of Perry's female protagonists across his films, with religious messaging being one of them. His choice to center For Colored Girls on this theme is no exception. But Perry fails to fully comprehend Shange's complex portrayal of the ways that black women find God. Shange articulates a spirituality that is fluid and introspective, even divinely feminine. Religion is never centrally cast in the text; spirituality is rather understood as a vehicle through which black women communicate with each other and with themselves. Arguably, the most widely quoted moment in For Colored Girls is when the "lady in red," one of the most memorable characters of the production, asserts, "I found god in myself & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely."

Read the Full Review @ The Nation

Has Tyler Perry Found His Voice? Some Thoughts on 'For Colored Girls'

Despite many predictions, 'For Colored Girls' is not a debacle

Has Tyler Perry Found a Voice Within Black Feminism?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

Despite many predictions, Tyler Perry’s screen adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls was not a debacle. The film was by far, the most nuanced and accomplished film in Perry’s oeuvre, owing much to the power and genius of Shange’s original work, the most consummate cast that Perry has worked with, and perhaps all those days on the set watching Lee Daniels at work filming Precious. For Colored Girls may represent Tyler Perry, perhaps finally, finding his own cinematic voice.

Directors like Kasi Lemmons and Julie Dash might have been better choices to direct Shange’s classic “choreopoem.” But in all fairness, despite their considerable talents, neither of those women would have been able to deliver the kind box office opening that has made Perry so bankable. Say what you will about Perry, if you were to ask average Black filmgoer to name a film by Lemmons and Dash you’ll likely get blank stares. You might also get just as many blank stares if you were to ask those same viewers if they’ve read Shange’s play.

For all of its status as “classic material” Shange’s work is not widely known among American audiences, particularly young folk, and this more than explains why Shange was willing to put the project in Perry’s hands. The $21 million opening for For Colored Girls may be below Perry’s usual standard, but it’s a major success for serious African-American drama. The Secret Life of Bees and The Great Debaters both had opening weekends of $10 million, for example.

But there’s a greater achievement in the opening weekend numbers of For Colored Girls. The film’s commercial success marks one of the visible moments for mainstream Black Feminism, within a national culture that has been largely ignorant of Black feminist writing and art. Unlike the work of Terri McMillan or the work of any number of Black women artists, who simply have a critique of the tired men in their lives, Shange’s For Colored Girls is the real deal, as evidenced by the staying power that it has in Black artistic and intellectual circles.

Read the Full Essay @ theloop21.com

Is Tyler Perry Possessed by the Word? Thoughts on 'For Colored Girls...'

Tyler Perry's Presence is the Difference Between a Major Blockbuster and a Little Watched Film.

Possessed by the Word?: Tyler Perry does 'For Colored Girls'
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21.com

There was a collective holding of breath recently, when the trailer for Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Was Enuff began to circulate on the internet. I was among those who were pleasantly surprised by the craftsmanship and power of the trailer, replete with a stunning vocal melding of Nina Simone’s classic “Four Women.”

The trailer is in clear contrast to what audiences have come to expect from the Tyler Perry brand. If the trailer is any indication of the quality of the film, than it might seem that our apprehensions about what would happen when Perry got his hands on this signature Black feminist text, might have been for naught. But are we witnessing a growth in Perry’ skill-set or the fact that even a “professional novice” like Perry can’t mess up a text that is so magical?

The original Broadway production of For Colored Girls…, which opened at the Booth Theater in September of 1976, inspired as much controversy as Perry’s adaptation does now. Produced two years before the publication of Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwomen, Shange’s text represented the most explicit expression of Black Feminist discourse to find an audience in mainstream American culture. In the late 1970s—before Alice Walker’s The Color Purple appears—the work of Shange, Wallace and novelist Gayl Jones became easy targets for those who believed that Black feminism undermined Black men, who were already under assault by racism and White supremacy.

In his 1980s essay, famously titled “Aunt Jemima Don’t Like Uncle Ben” Stanley Crouch described Shange’s work as “militant mediocrity and self pity.” However critics like Crouch and others felt about Shange’s work, the power of For Colored Girls… was not lost on anyone, including a ten-year old Joan Morgan who, two decades before the publication of her groundbreaking When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, was disappointed in not being able to accompany her mother to a performance of the show during that initial Broadway run. Perhaps Erykah Badu was recalling a similar reaction when she channeled Shange in her music video for “Bag Lady” (2000).

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21.com

Ntozake Shange: A New Work & a Reprise

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

A Writer’s Struggles, on and Off the Page
By FELICIA R. LEE

Her feminist war cry of a play, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” is Ntozake Shange’s signature work, produced on Broadway in 1976 when she was in her 20s. Now 61, her speech and movements slowed by a series of minor strokes but her intensity undimmed, Ms. Shange is having another moment, or two, this fall.

Out this week is her new novel, “Some Sing, Some Cry,” a nearly 600-page family saga written with her sister Ifa Bayeza. In early November, the long-awaited film adaptation of “For Colored Girls,” will bring that influential work to a new generation courtesy of a most unlikely director, the comedy and melodrama impresario Tyler Perry.

The film and the book each took winding paths to completion. Ms. Shange and Ms. Bayeza, 59, worked for 15 years on the complex task of jointly writing a novel that features seven generations of an African-American family sustained by one another and by music. After years of keeping in touch about the book mostly through e-mails and phone calls, they came together recently for a joint interview in the downtown Manhattan office of their publisher, St. Martin’s Press. Ms. Bayeza, a playwright, flew in from Chicago; Ms. Shange (her name is pronounced en-toh-ZAH-kee SHAHN-gay) took a car service from her home in Brooklyn.

Calling each other “Zake” and “Fa” and taking turns to remember bits of family lore, the sisters also talked about how they divided the writing, often by historical eras. “Some Sing, Some Cry” moves through Reconstruction, two World Wars, the Great Migration, and the civil rights movement. Along the way the descendants of Betty Mayfield create or are inspired by jazz, blues, spirituals, rhythm and blues and other forms of music. The book concludes in contemporary times with Tokyo Walker, a famous R&B singer who embarks on a tour of Africa.

Ms. Bayeza looked concerned during the interview when Ms. Shange seemed to become fatigued and shifted to be more comfortable. Ms. Shange was content to let her sister do most of the talking — “It’s her first novel,” she said later — though she made it clear that she felt the book fills a need: “I don’t see any complicated, thought-provoking depictions of black people in a multilayered way. That’s why I was willing to work on this for so long.”

Ms. Shange remained mum on who did what in the collaboration. She noted, though, that “each of our chapters has its own dialect, its own spelling and pronunciation of the characters’ names and also their perceptions of their skin colors.” Those variations reflect the fluidity of African-American language through the years, she said, and the power of perception.

Ms. Bayeza, who admitted that Ms. Shange wrote the opening pages and that she handled the sections having to do with war, said, “It becomes this kind of puzzle game for people to figure out where the voice shifts.” But they also did plenty of weaving, she added. Kaiama L. Glover, writing in a forthcoming review in The New York Times Book Review said the experiment largely worked, resulting in a “story of lifesaving music and heartbroken maternity” that is “engaging from start to finish.”

“Some Sing” is the first novel by Ms. Shange, who is also a prolific poet and playwright, since 1994’s “Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter,” about a young black artist’s struggle with racism and maternal abandonment. It gives readers “another family to turn to when things look bleak,” Ms. Shange said.

Bleak is how her own situation looked beginning in 2004. She began to have trouble with her balance and her speech and eventually received a diagnosis of having had a series of minor strokes. At her worst, she was unable to talk, read or write. Her speech is now audible but slowed, and her balance and dexterity are impaired.

Deciding to work with her sister had its genesis long before the stroke. In the 1970s a television and film producer approached Ms. Shange with the idea of a mini-series that would trace the history of black music through the role of women. Ms. Shange turned to Ms. Bayeza, whose stage works addressing black history include “Amistad Voices,” “Club Harlem,” and “The Ballad of Emmett Till.”

The two quickly sketched an outline for the arc of the story but shelved it for many years as life and other projects intervened. In the mid-’90s, they renewed the writing at the urging of Ms. Shange’s long-time editor at St. Martin’s, Michael Denneny.

“We grew up with stories like these,” Ms. Bayeza said of the novel’s tales. The sisters were raised in St. Louis and in Lawrence Township, N.J., the oldest of four children of a surgeon, Paul T. Williams, and Eloise O. Williams, a social worker and educator who also had a fondness for the arts. As young adults they jettisoned their given names for African ones.

While their parents are now deceased, the sisters can trace their father’s family line to 1757 with the arrival of two African brothers in the slave-holding territory of New Jersey. Their mother’s side was researched back to 1800 and Filis, an enslaved woman who traveled with her owners to South Carolina.

The story of how Betty Mayfield, a former slave travels to blackmail her white former owners, comes from real-life family lore, according to the sisters. Another character, Raymond Minor, reflects the life of their grandfather, a builder who passed for “black Irish” to get into the carpenter’s union in New York.

Both sisters are single now. Ms. Shange has an adult daughter and Ms. Bayeza does not have children. Their relationship is “symbiotic,” Ms. Bayeza said, close enough that they trusted each other to write without interference from the other. Ms. Bayeza confessed that some sections were hard to write; Ms. Shange said she went with the flow.

With a hefty first printing of 100,000, a national book tour and its selection as Essence magazine’s September book club pick, “Some Sing” might bring Ms. Shange her biggest splash since “For Colored Girls.”

A series of poetic monologues (Ms. Shange called it a “choreopoem”) about domestic abuse, abortion and self-love, among other topics, “For Colored Girls” is still steadily performed on college campuses, and is widely seen as influencing a generation of spoken-word poets, playwrights and performance artists.

Ms. Shange managed “to combine femininity and feminism” and wrap it in a downtown artistic sensibility, said Lynn Nottage, a playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Ruined.” She described Ms. Shange as “the first African-American female playwright I saw welcomed into the mainstream.”

For years, filmmakers talked about a movie version, but it came about courtesy of Mr. Perry, the writer and director of a successful string of films (and television series) about African-American life that some observers have criticized as clichéd and racially stereotypical. Much of his work has featured Mr. Perry in drag as the saucy matriarch Madea. Ms. Shange said she explicitly told Mr. Perry that Madea could not be in “Colored Girls.”

The film is scheduled to open in theaters on Nov. 5 with a starry ensemble cast that includes Phylicia Rashad, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, and Thandie Newton. And no Madea.

Read the Full Article @ The New York Times

Trailer: 'For Colored Girls', A Film By Tyler Perry