I remember 20 years ago, Tyler Perry said, when there were only 30 people in the audience. On this day on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, he could see a lot more than 30 just in the few rows below the stage where he stood in a black suit.
Across the huge arena that normally hosted college basketball games, a sea of faces that seemed to stretch to the sky looked back at him. I was with a group of people sitting up in the balcony, and I’m sure in his mind’s eye Perry could see us, too.
He talked unabashedly about his faith and his thankfulness at how far he had come – and even more for the people who had brought him there. He had arrived on their backs and he knew it. And they gave it back to him, with their cheering and their shout-outs and their applause. There was a mutuality of spirit all over the place.
Despite Spike Lee’s criticism, Tyler Perry has done good when all odds were against him. He shouldn’t be where he is, and he’s a testament to anyone who believes that they can’t catch a break. You can’t give up, Tyler said, because he never did.
And thank goodness he didn’t, because I would never have been introduced to Medea – a foul-mouthed no-nonsense woman who speaks her mind, puts you in your place and, like the grandmothers on the corners where Perry grew up, “didn’t take no crap.” A little of what we all would like to be – without the Smith and Wesson, however. I knew the character from Perry’s movies. She was someone who deep down inside had a good heart for good people. I consider her my guilty pleasure.
This was my first Medea play (there was so much singing that it could have been called a musical). I recalled years ago popping a rented videotape into my VCR to settle back to watch one of the early ones. I couldn’t get past the first five minutes. It was awful – character, plot, timing. But most of all, it wasn’t funny. Then Medea hit the movie screens and I tried her out again. This time, she was laugh-out-loud funny, rambunctious and as big as a a football field, and I’ve seen every one of her movies.
Medea first spread her wings in a series of Perry plays, the first “I Can Do Bad All By Myself” in 2000 (it later became a movie with Taraji P. Henson in 2009) . Perry had produced his first play, without the Medea character, in 1998 in a church that had been converted into a theater, and it had a limited run. His plays morphed into movies in the 2000s that led to the construction of his own studio in Atlanta.
There were also TV shows, which I consider among his most stereotypical offerings and I don’t watch them. I see too much of that stuff on the auction tables, reminders of what others thought we looked like and how we acted.
I never went to see Shelly Garrett’s plays for the same reason. His were a couple years before Perry’s, and were the church-basement-type shows tinged with religion and a lot of tomfoolery. They were very popular, though, as they made their way from town to town with performances aimed at black audiences. His “Beauty Shop,” which began making its rounds in 1989, was “the” black play for years.
Until Tyler Perry, who parlayed Medea into a franchise. On Sunday, he provided us with a preview of her next movie, “Madea’s Witness Protection,” which is headed into the theaters on June 29. A shameless plug, but a wise one.
During the play, I wanted to see more of Medea because when she was on the stage, she zinged. Except in the second act when the irreverent lady got preachy.
She preached when she was talking to a woman whose “good” daughter had dumped her at a retirement home. She preached to the woman who made wrong-headed choices in men. She preached to the non-responsive woman who allowed her daughter to spend hours away from her children and family just to read to her.
When did Medea get religion? I wondered. But it wasn’t Medea philosophizing; it was Perry himself. He had co-opted his character, because the Medea from the movies isn’t much into religion. She’s the one who mistakes Bible verses for Shakespeare.
To top off the evening, Perry rewarded the audience with a 20-minute concert by cast members performing the songs of Aretha, Frankie Beverly, Earth Wind and Fire, and more. Medea wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but I’m sure she would’ve been pleased.
