Lawrence Walker II as Malcolm X and Louis B. Murray as The Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Photo by Mark Shorts.
Not all history lessons are simple. Not all are easy to digest. Sometimes, one is confronted by a human story in which heroes and villains aren’t so readily tagged, where the message is obscured by the messengers. At Arena Players this month, audiences are being treated to a brilliant delivery of such a lesson in Laurence Holder’s “When the Chickens Come Home to Roost,” directed by Donald Owens.
…a staging that’s richly nuanced, where the actors have room to deliver amazing work.
Owens, the artistic director at Arena, is quietly helming an impressive 68th season at the playhouse on Baltimore’s west side. As locals are often reminded (though perhaps not often enough), Arena Players is the longest-active Black theater company in America. Its artistic success and financial viability have served as a beacon for decades, and a great deal of credit goes to its current-generation leadership of Owens and his managing director, David D. Mitchell. In this production, Owens revisits a familiar script with a powerful new cast. The result is urgent, theatrical, and compelling.
Holder’s play is a two-hander, exploring the relationship between Nation of Islam leader, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and his chief protégé, Malcolm X. It follows the period from Malcolm’s initial exposure to the NOI while serving in prison to the violent end of his life. The title is paraphrased from a comment made by Malcolm X in reaction to the murder of President Kennedy in 1963. He said the killing was “merely a case of chickens coming home to roost” in direct defiance of an order from Elijah Muhammad, not to comment on the matter during its immediate aftermath. This insubordination deepened a growing rift between the men, resulting in Malcolm’s excommunication and which led him to adopt more moderate views as a convert to Sunni Islam, a second name change (to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), and his founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. In service to plot, Holder ignores much of this late history, keeping focused on the magnetism and tensions that remained between the two men after their separation. The playwright’s language is austere—sentences are short and free of embellishment. This style provides Owens and his cast with a challenge of discipline. The result is a staging that’s richly nuanced, where the actors have room to deliver amazing work.
Lawrence Walker II plays Malcolm X, in his Arena Players debut. He’s a young actor whom we haven’t seen before, but based on his performance in this play, we expect to see a great deal of him in the future. He delivers pure fire at times and it stops the show when he does. Then he pivots to quiet panic, or petulance, or vanity, and does so with undeniable humanity. A young, unknown Denzel Washington originated the role 41 years ago, in the New Federal Theatre premiere (under the slightly different title, “When the Chickens Came Home to Roost”). Those are tough shoes to fill, but Walker on stage is impossible to ignore.
Louis B. Murray is a very familiar face on Maryland stages. He has brought both intensity and subtlety to a dizzying range of roles for many years, and his work here as Elijah Muhammad may be the best we’ve ever seen. His vocal delivery shows a great deal of care given to mastery of dialect. His physicality is purposefully quiet, underscoring his character’s age, while allowing his domination of the younger, taller Malcolm to project from the inside. Murray, too, is intensely human here, and allows his character’s weaknesses to escape in just the right doses.
The first scene features Walker clad in mis-buttoned prison denim—angry, lost, and proud. Murray lurks behind him, as an abstract representation of his character’s distant voice and growing influence over the young Malcolm Little. This scene belongs to Walker, commanding the stage with energy that’s on the brink of explosion. He avoids all of the caged tiger acting clichés, even as he raises his voice enough to put all of the natural reverberation of the theater on full display. When Elijah tells him that he seeks to use Malcolm “to prove the perfectibility of mankind,” Walker is both intrigued and puzzled. When Elijah asks “do you submit?” as an order or a dare, the proud Walker refuses initially but is on his knees by scene’s end.
The second scene is Murray’s. Fast-forwarding several years, the renamed and now-bespectacled Malcolm X joins Elijah to discuss the latter’s ongoing paternity suits and their attending embarrassment to the organization. Having come into his own as presumptive second in command, Malcolm has overstepped his authority and needs reining in. Here, Murray is phenomenally poised as his character must walk an emotional tightrope. Fully in control, he gets what he wants—then brings great irony, envy, and anxiety to the closing line, “I used to be the most dangerous man in America.”
Next, it’s November, 1963. JFK has been gunned down in Dallas, and as civil rights leaders are quick to express shock and horror, Elijah issues two directives to his ministers to withhold any comment about the president’s death. Malcolm disobeys, issuing the titular “roost” remark, and is called on the carpet for it. Again, Murray’s character controls the scene, at first, but both actors use this moment to ratchet-up the stakes in the men’s competition. Walker constantly edges closer and closer to a line that he knows he mustn’t cross, while Murray alternates between accusations of a palace coup and salesmanship. He goads the younger man to cross the line against him, the entrapment designed to justify a final punishment. There’s a beautiful, painful coda here when Murray again demands “do you submit?” This time, Walker remains upright.
The penultimate scene is a structural return to prison. Murray is an absent voice in Walker’s mind while the two characters again share the stage in an abstract way. This time the separation is complete. Walker rages, gun in hand, looking for would-be assailants while Murray makes a last-ditch attempt to reach some kind of peace between them. Both men know it’s too late, as we see in the inevitable and abrupt final scene. “It’s hard to be a Black man in America,” Elijah tells him earlier in the play, “because you’ve got to be paranoid too.”
Running Time: 118 minutes with one intermission.
Advisory: A firearm prop and sound effect are used.
“When the Chickens Come Home to Roost” runs through February 27, 2022 at Arena Players, 801 McCulloh Street, Baltimore 21201. For tickets call (410) 728-6500 or purchase online. Patrons are required to provide proof of vaccination and must remain masked.
