It is little known historical fact that in 1932, the Communist Party of the USA spearheaded a film project highlighting the plight of Black Americans that was fully paid for and sponsored by Joseph Stalin. Over a dozen Black Americans were recruited from Harlem to travel to the Soviet Union for filming and production, and Langston Hughes was hired to revise the screenplay in order to make the story and its characters more realistic and responsive to the Black American experience. At the time, James Ford, a Black Tennesseean who became a prominent civil rights leader, was the Vice-Presidential candidate on the American Communist Party’s presidential ticket. It was Ford who convinced Stalin to fund the film as a way to garner support for the Communist Party more globally. The film was absolutely a propagandist project against American capitalism, but for many of the Black actors involved, it was the first time they felt seen, heard, and respected as artists. Red Harlem is a play that imagines the lives of four of these artists as they embark upon a journey from the Cotton Club of Harlem to the vibrant nightclub scene in Berlin to the grandeur of Moscow where they are treated for the first time as first-class citizens, free from the unrelenting racism they’ve known their whole lives in America.
Red Harlem is having its World Premiere with the Company of Angels Theater in Los Angeles. For me, watching the play in full production was particularly gratifying as I had the pleasure of participating in the Company of Angels’ Professional Playwrights’ Group with the playwright Kimba Henderson back in 2021. At the time, Red Harlem was in its very early development; Kimba was still discovering the character arcs and their relationships to one another. To see the fully fleshed camaraderie between the members of this tight-knit group, despite their conflicting needs, desires, and fears, was incredibly satisfying and moving.
The world of the play is big and all-encompassing in terms of the diversity of characters and the depth of human experience in the 1930s. What makes it so dynamic is that it is transnational, transpolitical, and transracial. All the borders are blurred as Kimba resists the urge to put her characters into their own separate boxes. Here there are no clean-cut dichotomies of good vs. evil, moral vs. immoral, or villains vs. heroes. Lenore, a staunch Communist, falls for David, a Jewish man from Brooklyn whom Lenore believes to be half-black. Shifty is a member of the working class, a person with no party affiliation, but one with a keen eye for hustle, and an eventual soft spot for Velma, the cross-dressing nightclub manager in Berlin. Selena and Will are a couple who love and support each other’s aspirations but are susceptible to competition and jealousy as the power between them shifts once in the Soviet Union. Misha, the general who is appointed handler to the actors, is providing cover for the Communist Party whilst growing his empathy for the eclectic group under his charge. And finally, there’s Colonel Cooper, factually the world-renowned engineer who constructed the Dnieper Dam for the Soviets and brought electricity to millions, who also happens to run into this film production and plays an influential role in shutting it down. At every turn, the characters’ own core beliefs are challenged through their encounters in a new land, across racial and cultural borders.
One of the more interesting aspects of the play for me is how Kimba addresses colorism. Selena, a regular dancer at the Cotton Club, is employable because of her light skin tone, while Lenore knows all too well the sting of rejection simply because of her darker complexion. In the Soviet Union, this color hierarchy is switched, and Lenore feels like her talent can finally shine. Simultaneously, Lenore falls for David but feels betrayed when she learns that he is Jewish and not a light skinned Black person as he’d allowed her to believe. All the nuanced assumptions around race—and what it means to be Black in America vs. elsewhere—reminded me of how much race has been socially constructed for the purpose of building an American empire.
In talking with Kimba, we discuss the significance of historical fiction and the import of Red Harlem today. Kimba says, “I don’t want to write something if I don’t feel it’s relevant” and how “the play kept getting more and more relevant.” She points out, by way of example, how the Brownshirts were like the Proud Boys, and how the Nazi rhetoric mirrors much of what we hear from our polarizing President. And too, the fight for world dominance and ideological superiority, at the expense of masses of civilian populations, is age-old and still at play in a war that is happening right now as I write this.
Further, I always like to ask other writers about their process. It’s out of my personal desire to glean their magic tricks: How did they do it? What’s in the secret sauce? For Kimba, she quips, “flow writing.” When she worked with the Robey Theatre Company, she had a mentor encourage her to place her characters in a place they’d never normally be, and to explore through freewriting, why they happened to be there and how they dealt with the discomfort. Kimba frequently employs What-if writing exercises like this, particularly in the world-building phase of her development. She says that she has pages and pages of such kind of writing on each of her characters, scribblings that never make it to the final play. She knows them and their pasts so well that when she’s asked any dramaturgical question, she can readily imagine how a character might respond. In one of her best examples, Kimba describes a late addition to play, a scene where David writes a heartfelt letter to Selena apologizing for withholding the truth about his being Jewish. In it, he tries to explain his philosophy on life, recounting a memory of his father standing outside Small’s Paradise, a Harlem Jazz club, tapping his foot and enjoying the music but never allowing himself entry. David never wanted to live his life like his father, standing on the perimeter of life’s joy.
The play is directed by Kimba’s longtime friend and artistic collaborator, Bernadette Speakes. Kimba credits Speakes for her ability to take viewers from setting to setting, across the globe with a small moving set of screens, some well curated projections, and a few stage blocks. Even in the 99-seater space, the play manages to pull off a kind of magical splendor. There are big musical and dance numbers with choreography and costuming befitting of professional entertainers and denizens of nightlife in the 1930s. The play is, after all, about performers and their passion for their art at all costs. Kimba says, “you can’t own people’s artistry. They own that. That is theirs,” and that this play, ultimately, is about these actors, each in their own way, “taking ownership of their artistry.” That message carries resonance. At all times, both then and now, artists like myself and hopefully you the reader, through whatever sacrifices and concessions we have made, have been staking a claim to our creative lives.
This is a story that needs to be told, and I hope that it gets told many times over—on stages, on small and big screens, to classrooms full of historians, to world leaders who claim historical amnesia, and to all the artists of color who are still waiting for permission.
The World Premiere of Red Harlem at Company of Angels ran February 14 – March 15. Go Here for more information about the production.
