[NEohioPAL] Review of "The Royale" at Cleveland Play House

[Bob Abelman]

Cleveland Play House leads with its left with expressionistic, heavyweight drama ‘The Royale’



Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, American Theatre Critics Association



Howard Sackler's Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Great White Hope” offered a dramatization of the real life struggles – the demonization, the racism, the ridicule – of boxer Jack Johnson after becoming the first African American heavyweight champion of the world at the start of the 20th century.



Originally staged in 1967, the drama was a gargantuan production that featured 63 actors playing 247 roles in 20 scenes that jump counties and countries over the course of three and a half hours. The show boldly and uncompromisingly took to the stage at a time when the civil rights movement took to the streets.



Marco Ramirez's “The Royale” – premiering in 2013 and currently being staged by the Cleveland Play House as the main event of this year’s New Ground Theatre Festival – explores the personal demons Johnson encountered on his way to that championship fight.



The storytelling is comparatively sparse and intimate, stripped down to one act, five actors and a boxing ring.  And it is given an expressionistic theatricality that doesn’t so much serve to display the state of racism in this country as subtly remind us just how deeply ingrained it is in the American psyche. 



For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/bob_abelman/
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