Name: Schoolhouse Theater’s American Icons Season: (mis)Understanding Mammy
Start: 2023-07-29T20:00:00-04:00
End: 2023-07-29T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Schoolhouse Theater

Schoolhouse Theater’s American Icons Season: (mis)Understanding Mammy

July 29, 2023 @ 8:00 pm

|Recurring Event (See all)

Schoolhouse Theater’s American Icons Season: (mis)Understanding Mammy the Hattie McDaniel Story

(mis)UNDERSTANDING MAMMY, a one-woman play with music, is a story of race in America, examined through the lens of Hattie McDaniel’s remarkable life. Hattie achieved stardom by becoming the first African-American to win an Academy Award, but she paid a high price for fame. By playing a succession of maids and cooks, most notably Mammy in “Gone With The Wind,” she became the target of an unrelenting “campaign against Mammyism” led by Walter White of the NAACP who thought her roles were stereotypical and degrading to their race.

The Schoolhouse production will star Tina Fabrique who has received the Kevin Kline Award for her performance as Ella Fitzgerald in Ella. She has appeared on Broadway in Gospel at Colunus, Ragtime, Bring in the Noise, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The play is written by Joan Ross Sorkin and directed by Seret Scott, a winner of American Theatre’s prestigious Gordon Davidson Award.

Set in 1952 at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, the play begins as Hattie is dying of breast cancer. Hallucinating in her hospital room, Hattie believes Walter White has come to reconcile their differences, and in order to prove to him that she was indeed a credit to her race, she reminds him of the major events of her life and her many “firsts,” large and small. Throughout Hattie’s roller coaster ride, she sings and dances, cracks jokes, and recites the lines that made her famous, illuminating a life so often misunderstood.

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