Great Barrington — As part of its inaugural season offerings, Barrington Public Theater will present a reading of local writer Wesley Brown’s play “Dark Meat in a Funny Mind” on Tuesday, June 4 at 7 p.m., in the Daniel Art Center at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. The play’s subject is the “King of Comedy” Richard Pryor’s life and work. Brown, a colleague at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, recently discussed with me the genesis of the play and how it has developed over the years.
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Michel: What gave you the idea to write a play about Richard Pryor’s life and work?
Brown: It was after Pryor passed away in 2005. He was 65. I started listening to recordings of his old club routines in my car and it took me back to how important he had been to me as a writer. I was laughing so hard in my car I had to pull over. It occurred to me that I had to do something with this. He was such an incredible artist that I felt that I had to give back to all he had given me.
He was an influence on me as a writer because he told stories…He brought to life characters who, in most instances, were seen as disreputable and/or demonized because they were not respectable and were involved in what might be considered the underground economy in the black community…And Pryor humanized them, with all of their flaws. He presented them as full human beings. They were all black, and that was something you did not see in the culture at large at that time.
Michel: Some of our readers may not know much about Richard Pryor. When did he break onto the scene?

Brown: He first broke into comedy in the 60’s as a stand up comic making the circuit. He started to get attention and there was a moment in the mid 60s when he was on the Ed Sullivan show. That’s something that all entertainers coveted…if you were on Ed Sullivan, you had arrived. Then he was on Johnny Carson. And if you performed on “The Tonight Show” and at the end of your bit he invited you to come and sit down, you were launched as an artist! That created a bonanza for Pryor’s first two albums, “Richard Pryor,” recorded live at the “Troubadour” in West Hollywood, and “Craps (After Hours).” Those albums began to take off and more lucrative venues began to book Pryor to perform.
Michel: What was your first encounter with Pryor’s work?
Brown: I remembered him from “The Ed Sullivan Show” and the “Merv Griffin” show, which he was also on. I was always drawn to him as a black entertainer who was not Bill Cosby. He was different. He tried to mimic Cosby for a time but it wasn’t his voice…there were other voices speaking through him and to make it as a comedian, he had to give voice to all those people living inside himself. He knew those people. He was part of the same community…
Michel: Did you ever see him live?
Brown: In 1970 I went to the Bitter End Café in the Village, where artists who were starting out performed. Seeing him live was amazing. To really appreciate Pryor you needed to see him live, in a club. He was in his element…with just him, a mic, the lights and the audience.
Michel: This performative essence at the core of Pryor lends itself well to the theater. How did this translate to the writing of a play about him?

Brown: I didn’t want to do the usual sequential narration that you might find in a play about someone’s life and work.
Once I decided that I didn’t want it to be linear, I realized that I wanted to write the play in a way that it would be partly stand-up performance and partly how his performing stand-up segued into aspects of how that stand up came into being…how it summoned up these life experiences that so informed his work, so that there was a seamlessness between the two.
I felt that he was most alive, most affirming and dealing with his demons when he was doing stand-up and was at the mercy of them when he wasn’t.
I wanted to encompass both aspects of his life that he talked about freely in his performance…between his performance on stage and how that would project out into the incidents that those performances were taken from. In the play, I start with him late in life, incapacitated by multiple sclerosis. Since this is all in his imagination because he’s in a wheelchair, the two parts of himself can encompass both.
I didn’t want it to be a trajectory of his life in a conventional way with many characters. So I came up with the idea that since he’s in the wheelchair, he could imagine going back with an alter ego who is a presence providing some opposition to him, a presence that was part of him and who can challenge him. Initially, that alter ego was a male figure but a friend of mine at an early reading said that she thought that the character should be a woman and I knew immediately that she was right. So I changed it.
Michel: In your play this character is called Rumpelthinskin. Is Rumpelthinskin a character in his work?
Brown: He wrote a memoir called “Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences.” In it he talks about being fascinated by fairy tale characters and one of them was Rumpelstiltskin. The story goes that if the princess can guess his name, Rumpelstiltskin won’t have dominion over her. Pryor’s full name was Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor, so given all his names, I thought that the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale could serve as a framework for exploring all of the parts of him that were unreconciled. It was his alter ego, whom I renamed Rumpelthinskin, who presses him to understand his life, and the way to do that is to go through all those names he was given, which he is reluctant to do. So the play becomes a journey of self-exploration.
There’s a part of Pryor who is thin-skinned and that’s the part that he doesn’t want to examine because it’s the part that is vulnerable. It can be poked at because it’s right below the surface. So Rumpelthinskin refers to the fact that you have to develop an exterior to protect yourself while you examine those parts of yourself that are thin skinned…but no one else can do that. You are the one who must take that on.
Michel: What was the biggest challenge you faced writing this play?
Brown: Not wanting to use any of his actual material. Why do that when people could listen to the CD’s? I had to find a way to approximate things he might have done or did do — without using them. To find a way to reimagine those routines as true to what he actually did do. And hope that it would be funny.
Michel: Was there anything that surprised you or that you didn’t expect during the writing process?
Brown: The discoveries I made in terms of how I actually found the path to writing something that I didn’t expect, such as with the Rumpelstiltskin story and the Rumpelthinskin character. Or finding the stories that he told… I was able to recast or reinvent things that he had done in a form that was truthful to his life but also not taking them directly from his own stories. The more I wrote the more I was able to discover stories that he might have used in his standup routine. I then began to write in a style that approximated his own.
Michel: When did you first hear the play read?
Brown: I was involved with a group of actors, directors and playwrights in Columbia County in New York, near the Berkshires. And I read the first part of the play with the actors there. That was the first time I had the opportunity to hear some of the play. Then there was a reading at the Spencertown Academy with Kevin Craig West before I changed the alter ego from male to female. Then Karen Beaumont directed a scene from the play in “Made in the Berkshires” and Kevin came again to read it. It was a monologue. There was a reading of it at the Signature Theatre down in NYC. Woody King used that space to do a series of readings. It was two actors, Mark Curry from “Hangin’with Mr. Cooper” played Pryor and Ted Lange from “Love Boat” played Rumpelthinskin. In 2014, Daniel Gallant, director of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, read the script and wanted to produce it. That production was directed by A. Dean Irby and featured Charles Weldon and Trish McCall. A few years later, Curtis King, director of The Black Academy of Arts and Letters in Dallas, Texas, produced a reading of the play to Dallas audiences. This current reading at Barrington Public Theater will feature Kevin Craig West as Pryor. He has now been with the play for much of its development and I am delighted that he is returning to work with MaConnia Chesser from Shakespeare and Company to bring it to life once more.
I really look forward to hearing it with these talented actors in front of a new audience.
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The reading is free and open to the public and will be presented in the Leibowitz Black Box Theater in the Daniel Arts Center on the campus of Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Reservations are not required.