PZ's Picks - S&H Nov/Dec 2005

It is like a broken record. I am sure people say to themselves, Oh no, another one of PZ’s enthusiams! But Hurricane Katrina re-opened the wound and we cannot get away from it.

I am talking about Tyler Perry’s plays. Whenever I commend “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” (2005) to the mostly white audiences to whom I speak, most people’s eyes glaze over. They have never heard of Tyler Perry and have never seen “Diary.” “Urban theater,” as it is now respectfully called, is not on their screen. Then when they see “Diary,” they get worried about the ending. Is it exactly sound?

But Katrina has re-opened the wound. What Katrina told us is that our country has, to quote the New York Times from the Sunday after the storm, “a race deferred.” It is the Black community that took the brunt of the big one, and it is their plight concretely that is on our hearts. There are many plights from the storm, but the numbers in this case flow in one direction.

It is Tyler Perry who has captured the voice, the words, and the experience of the Black community in this country. You may have never seen one of his plays, but the person who makes up your bed in the hotel has. Mary and I had never heard of him, until a woman who worked in the kitchen at Advent Day School in Birmingham told us about him and got us tickets to see a show he had co-written. We were the only white people in an audience of 10,000. Then here came this phenomenal talent leaping from the stage, with an even more phenomenal Christian message. We could not believe our ears and eyes.

People ask me what our first response to the hurricane was, at Trinity. I say that once John Macdonald had come forward as the School’s Katrina coordinator, and once a mission trip to the Gulf Coast entered the planning stages, the next step, for everybody, was this: Go out and watch a Tyler Perry video. Then you can interpret what has happened, or rather, the fault line that what happened to New Orleans has revealed.

Paul Sez, See “Madea’s Family Reunion.” It is easily available at any Best Buy. It takes place in what used to be the ghetto in New Orleans, and was filmed, incidentally, at the Sainger Theater in New Orleans. The message of human disentitlement, coupled with an intently focused message of the Gospel, is about as apt an expression of pain and comfort that could be viewed in the year’s aftermath of the storm. It will carry you through the inevitable repercussions of what has happened, on the many fronts on which they will take place. And it will carry you to the Cross, directly and with no mediation. Tyler Perry’s plays – and his new one is called “Madea Goes to Jail,” and I am living for it, not to mention his second Hollywood movie, due out this February, which is a treatment of the aforementioned “Family Reunion” – are urgent addresses of need directed straight from Calvary.

So yes, consider this one of “PZ’s enthusiasms,” but, hey, for the sake of hurricane relief, and I mean this, rent one of these plays on video and let it “Rock the World.”