This deserves the widest audience possible! It’s both one of the most important and funniest shows I’ve seen in quite some time, and this is in a year that also included the especially pungent and humane The Humans. Named after the final words of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Turn Me Loose is sharply focused on one of the sharpest wits and minds of the past hundred years, African-American comedian and activist Dick Gregory, played with equal parts panache and passion by Joe Morton.
One of the greatest talkers of his time, Gregory provides playwright Gretchen Law with abundant material, from both his stand up and his numerous speeches and interviews on behalf of the civil rights movement. She has successfully distilled it all down to only the funniest, pithiest and most visionary bits.
John Carlin plays a number of smaller roles ranging from hecklers to interviewers, starting out the show as a white comic opening for Gregory in the early 1960s, a very Borscht Belt “Take-my-wife-please” type. Law is very clever in having this brief “warm-up” act, to show what a marked contrast Gregory was to what came before him.
Turn Me Loose zig zags back and forth in time, mostly between the present (Gregory is still very much alive) and the height of his activist days, the 1960s. His work with the civil rights movement became so intense that one bit extracted from a 1968 stand up find him at a loss to find anything funny to say. Clearly he recovered, since the more contemporary material finds him in fine fettle, furious but still ferociously funny.
Gregory went on to become a bit of a conspiracy theorist, and Turn Me Loose largely skirts that side of him. The exception comes in those theories which time has proven to be true, such as the conspiracy to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and the conspiracy of companies like Monsanto to always pursue profit over their customers’ health. This is truly essential viewing, and as such gets my highest recommendation.
For tickets, click here.
To learn about Jonathan Warman’s directing work, see jonathanwarman.blog.
