"Green Book" shares history lesson, restates the obvious

In today’s world, if you want to find a good meal or a firm mattress for the night, you pick up a travel guide. We take it for granted that the hotels and restaurants of the American highway are more or less safe and inviting, and certainly free of racist hazards.

But African-Americans in the Jim Crow era needed safe harbor from the hatred and bigotry of a segregated society. And so in 1936, a Harlem postal worker named Victor H. Green created “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide,” a trustworthy listing of drug stores, beauty parlors, service stations and private homes where people of color could do business without fear of race mongering. The so-called “Green Book” has inspired Atlanta writer Calvin Alexander Ramsey to author both an illustrated children’s book, “Ruth and the Green Book” (Carolrhoda Books, $16.95), and a play, “The Green Book,” which is having its world premiere at Theatrical Outfit through Sept. 11.

Directed by Freddie Hendricks, Ramsey’s domestic drama offers a peek into this fascinating, little known chapter of American history by placing us in the living room of a Missouri couple who run a “tourist home” for black travelers. As Dan and Barbara Davis (played by Archie Lee Simpson and Donna Biscoe) wake up on a day in 1953 when Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois is in town for a lecture, their home becomes an intersection of polite conversation, awkwardness, bigotry and bloodshed.

It’s a noble effort, nicely designed and performed, but a bit lackluster in the writing department. Ramsey turns the everyday breakfast-table conversation of the middle-class Davis household into a kind of social-studies classroom, where history, culture and politics are explained with footnotes on jazz, baseball, literature and so on.

But the idea that elders instruct the younger generation about the hard times and hard knocks of life doesn’t come off as especially original, revelatory or entertaining. Too often, characters are describing the past instead of engaging us in the moment, and comic opportunities fall by the wayside. Ramsey doesn't trust his story enough on its own, so he tacks on a prologue in which a character based on Green (Rob Cleveland) is having a phone chat with Langston Hughes — even the famous poet needs "The Green Book."

But pay attention to the young, confident Keith Chenault (Neal A. Ghant), a “Green Book” salesman who exploits segregation with entrepreneurial glee. “I believe in playing the hand you’re dealt. White water fountains, Negro water fountains: it’s still water,” says the "Green Book"-thumping young man in the red Cadillac convertible, to the horror of the Davis family. He likes things the way they are, because they can make him rich. The blatantly racist Chenault is the stock villain of the story, and sojourner Victor Lansky (Barry Stewart Mann), a Holocaust survivor, is the victim. Victor’s tale should be heartbreaking, but it comes across as rather forced, convoluted, saccharine and preposterous.

Travelers George Smith (E. Roger Mitchell) and his wife, Jackie (Sharisa Whatley), feel kind of desultorily inserted to reveal the mercenary machinations of Chenault, who ultimately comes off like a mustache-twisting caricature. Their story feels a bit muddy. The Davises’ daughter, Neena (Veanna Black), has a crush on Chenault, but after listening in on his conversation for most of the second act, she is disabused of her infatuation.

After an evening of exposition, the play’s last-minute spillover of violence and Chenault’s fleeting glimmer of redemption don’t make for very interesting storytelling. As tourists along for the ride, we get a commentary on the parallel horrors of segregation and the Holocaust. But too often, Ramsey seems to be re-stating the obvious.

Theater review

“The Green Book”

Grade: C+

7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Sundays. Also 2:30 p.m. Aug. 27, Aug. 31 and Sept. 10. 11 a.m. Sept. 7. Through Sept. 11. $15-$35. Theatrical Outfit, Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St., Atlanta. 678-528-1500, theatricaloutfit.org