Kyle Kellams: TheatreSquared's next offering is a world premiere, but “Malcolm X and Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack in Harlem” isn't completely new to the T2 stage. Jonathan Norton's play is a T2 commission, part of the theatre's new play development program. An in-progress reading took place in Fayetteville in the summer of 2024, and there have also been additional readings at Primary Stages in New York City.
All along the journey, the same two actors, Trey Smith Mills and Edwin Green, have been portraying the young subjects known in the 1940s as Malcolm Little and John Sanford. This week, playwright Jonathan Norton and director Dexter J. Singleton came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio to discuss the production.
And yes, young Malcolm X and young Redd Foxx did work side by side in Harlem in the 1940s. Director Dexter J. Singleton says it's been a fulfilling experience to help guide this play through infancy to world premiere.
Dexter J. Singleton: It's been wonderful just to have them, along with the entire journey, to help us with their questions and their talents, skills, insight. They've been along with us for each draft, and to be able to implement new dialogue into the script and then have actors who you can just bounce it off of immediately and see how it works and how it lands, and then be able to go back and do revisions. It's been extremely helpful and great.
Kellams: Jonathan, I think I've asked you this before, but the inspiration—we know that Malcolm Little and Redd Foxx did work together in Harlem at Jimmy's Chicken Shack. When did you find out about this?
Jonathan Norton: I found out about it, I suppose it was sometime the summer of 2022, maybe? It was while I was starting the commission for TheatreSquared, and I thought I would be writing one play. I thought I was going to write a play about Malcolm X and Maya Angelou, and I struggled so badly with that play. I went back to reading his autobiography, as well as her autobiography All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes.
In his autobiography, I ran across the passage about the time that he spent in Jimmy's Chicken Shack working with Redd Foxx. And just immediately I said to myself, there's a play in there somewhere. I reached out to Dexter to tell him about it, and that was the start of it.
Kellams: So you have these two young men who become legends, inspirations across political, societal and entertainment avenues. How do you respect the legends but also imagine what their conversations might be like?
Singleton: I think one of the places where we started from was this play recognizes these two young men as who they were before they became these American legends. And it's important for audiences, when they come to check it out, to remember that these are just two everyday young men who are trying to figure out their lives at 18 and 21.
Jonathan always says we know them eventually as Redd Foxx and Malcolm X, but in this play you're meeting Malcolm Little and John Sanford. They start from this place that everybody starts from when they're those ages—just trying to figure out your life, what you want to do, where you want to take things, the highs and the lows, how you get through it.
But these two young men met each other at such a pivotal time in their lives. They find this unlikely friendship in the back of this restaurant. That restaurant itself was also famous for so many other legends who came through there, right? Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Earl Hines, Art Tatum—all of American jazz history is also part of this, the legacy of this great restaurant.
Kellams: Jonathan, you've incorporated history—the era, the 1940s, the musicians who were there and playing. How did that work for you, incorporating the history into this?
Norton: For me, it was one of the things that kept the creative process alive and active and fun and thrilling for me, just having the opportunity to go in and try and figure out, at this particular moment in time, what might have been the historical and cultural influences that shaped these two young men. Of course, music would be a part of that. Of course, what's happening in the daily news cycle would be a part of that. Those things also helped to generate new ideas as well.
If I was trying to do something completely outside the realm of history or within the present day, I wouldn't have access to that. But certainly going back in time was actually a really great gift in creating this story.
Kellams: I saw this as a script-in-hand kind of last summer. Was it just last summer?
Norton: Summer 2024, yes.
Kellams: What changes as you make it more three-dimensional?
Norton: Certainly, since summer of 2024, there has been additional development based upon what we learned during the Arkansas New Play Festival in 2024. That experience itself was a huge learning opportunity. From the readings we did here in Northwest Arkansas, we were able to then go back and have conversations about our reaction to audience response and how that could inform the play as we were moving forward.
Now, as we're moving into production, what's just been so exciting and thrilling, specifically for me, is actually seeing the Chicken Shack come alive and all of the details of what it means to make this happen on stage. That continually has informed the play itself in terms of new pages or changes that we're making, very much informed by the material world that now exists around us that did not exist when it was just a reading with scripts in hand.
Singleton: Yeah, it originally was, you know, Jonathan and me, and then adding in Trey and Edwin. And so it was the four of us through that development process. But like Jonathan just said, to add now a whole team of designers, staff departments, all their collective brilliance and ideas and questions have now just made it really—now it's fully come to life. And that's just an amazing thing to bring it from the ideas of he and I having these conversations years ago and now all the way fast forward to seeing it on stage and real and those things that Jonathan conceived in his mind. And it's just it's brilliant.
Norton: We actually had a moment a few days ago in rehearsal where there was something that I conceived. I won't go into too much detail. There was something I conceived in my mind that as we were trying to put it up on its feet with all of the technical details, lighting and sound and the actors’ work, I just sat there for a moment and I was like, ah. And then Dexter looks at me. He goes, you know, I don't really know if we actually need this. And I'm like, you said it, I didn't. It's gone.
Kellams: What is that process like? You're bringing something to life. You know, I think laypeople, we might think, oh, three weeks ago, you had it all ironed out. Now it's just the rehearsal. But you're still tweaking and thinking of ideas.
Singleton: Oh, yeah. We're sending each other notes last night.
Norton: Last night I sent new pages.
Singleton: New pages, new pages to me last night. And so I read over them. I had a bunch of different ideas based on some notes. We're going to have a conversation about some things that we might want to change or implement for today's rehearsal. Then we're able to work on it this afternoon, and then we have a dress run, a final dress run this evening. So some of those things will be implemented tonight, the new stuff. And if they're not implemented tonight, they'll go in tomorrow.
Kellams: The team, the trust you must have with each other to be doing that now. ]
Singleton: Yeah, absolutely. And we trust Trey and Edwin's ability to be able to pick it up really quickly, implement it and then put it in the show. And they trust us that we're going to be able to come up with it quickly enough and present it to them in a way that they can trust for us that it's going to be good and help the play to grow.
Norton: And it's a new play. It's a world premiere and that's the work. So it's not as if you're staging a classic that nothing changes. You're just getting the show up on its feet in tech. It's a new play. Trey, who plays Foxy, is always saying it's alive. It's alive, like in Frankenstein. it's a living thing. And so there's that constant working and tweaking and perfecting that happens through tech and will continue to happen through previews.
Singleton: Yeah. And because we are doing this play as part of a four-theater co-production, which means it travels from theater to theater throughout the season, there may be some things that we recognize in this full run after watching these audiences here in Fayetteville that we may want to implement for them when we go to Pittsburgh in January.
Kellams: And I love I went to the theaters that are part of the co-production and particularly Dallas. On the web page it says, running time, 90 minutes, but then in parentheses, estimation, still in rehearsals in Arkansas. And I just love that. It just gives you this idea that this is a fresh, fresh work.
And I think one of the things that's amazing about this script, when I saw it in the summer of ’24, was, yes, set 80 years ago, one character murdered more than 50, 60 years ago, another died on set in the early ’90s. Okay, you know, it's the 1940s, but it feels as if it's speaking to 2025. Yeah.
Singleton: History repeats itself, right? We always say that and know that. And so many of those things that our various relatives and ancestors were dealing with back in that time, many of those things we're still dealing with today, right? The world changes, but sometimes it repeats its mistakes. Sometimes those two steps forward don't seem as far, and we hope that maybe one day there's a time where history won't have to repeat itself, especially with those ugly time periods. But who knows, because it's been that way for quite a while. And I think some people will, obviously because of that, many things of the play—it's during World War II, Harlem is changing, becoming this renaissance of great artistry and business and other fields. And then how Black Americans, the things that they wanted for themselves at that time period, Black men coming back from the war and then all the different conflicts that were happening in cities across America. But we know that that happened again in the ’60s. Then it happened again in 2020 around George Floyd protests. And so it's a world where it's a cycle that continues. But hopefully, one day we can learn from those lessons enough to effectively change so that we don't have to repeat it.
Kellams: Jonathan, I think the majority of people that will be in the audience were not alive when Malcolm X was alive, right? I mean, because it's been more than 60 years since he was murdered. A lot of people will not. You know, I think if, what, Redd Foxx died in 1991. So you've got a big part of the audience who might not completely remember him either. Did that matter at all to you since we’re meeting these two young men before they were famous?
Norton: I think largely because we're meeting them before they were famous just provides us a great opportunity, in terms of for those folks in the audience who might not really know these men as well. It's almost like you're getting the—what's like the thing? The prequel story. And so I think because you're getting the prequel story versus getting the story of who we knew these men to be, I think that actually opens the door for all audience members to kind of enter the play somewhat on an equal footing. And also, I feel like there's just something meaningful about the idea of getting to understand that someone struggled, the ways in which someone struggled informs who they become, because it reflects back on us in terms of our own challenges, our own struggles. And to be able to imagine that if these two men who went on to do such great things, what they were actually able to overcome in order to achieve that, it reminds us of what we ourselves can overcome. And then, oh, one other thing I'd like to add is one of the things that's really important about this play for me is just the opportunity to explore brotherhood and vulnerability between two Black men, because that's not something that we often get to see on stage, particularly the vulnerability part. Right. Because we're not really allowed to be vulnerable in society. And just seeing these two men be there for each other and grieve with each other and be raw at times with each other, I think that's just a necessary thing to see on stage. And in that sense, I have a hope that particularly for African American male audience members that the play can resonate in that way.
Kellams: I hope no one ever gave you the note, shorten the title. Because it doesn't– I don't know if any theater uses marquees still, but it would be a challenge, I guess, to fit on a marquee.
Singleton: Yeah. That's been the only title of the play. And Jonathan said this is the title of the play
Norton: When I read the passage in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That was the title. As soon as I read that passage, that was the title of the play from day one.
Singleton: Yeah. It's been—and it's brilliant. And it was like, okay, you know. And I think maybe I said at one point early, early on, oh, are you sure that's the title? But it was a great title from the beginning. And it sticks. And I think it's helped a lot in terms of the play's recognition along the way. And so it's been a beautiful thing.
Kellams: Well, thank you so much for letting Fayetteville be part of this, and I can't wait to see it in full set and everything.
Singleton: Thank you so much. We're looking forward to it as well. And it's going to be a great ride starting here in Fayetteville and ending in Dallas in June.
Kellams: Dexter J. Singleton is the director of “Malcolm X and Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack in Harlem.” It opens at TheatreSquared this weekend. Jonathan Norton is the playwright. After its world premiere run at T2, the production moves to City Theatre in Pittsburgh, Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk, and Dallas Theater Center as part of the four-theater co-production.
Our conversation took place at the Carver Center for Public Radio earlier this week.
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