As Marketing Manager of Oceanside Theatre Company at the Brooks in San Diego County, I make it a point to read the works I'm marketing as soon as possible. This spring, we are super excited to put on the Southern California Premiere of Douglas Lyons' "Chicken & Biscuits." The set up for the play is familiar - a family comes together for the funeral of the patriarch and drama and laughs ensue. It has all the premise of a Tyler Perry movie on the surface and holds enough similarity in plot to "A Madea Family Funeral" that it's an easy trap to fall into, but Kevin "Blax" Burroughs the play's director wants to make one thing clear - "Chicken & Biscuits" is NOT a Tyler Perry movie.
It definitely isn't. Like many whites of my generation and those before me, I wasn't automatically drawn to Perry's movies. Typically featuring all black casts, the previews typically centered around the robust and intentionally ridiculous character Madea (played by Perry) usually threatening to wallop someone. Subconsciously, I absorbed the message that Perry's movies were black movies - as in made by and for black people. And then, I actually sat down and watched the Madea movies.
That's when I discovered that there is no such thing as black movies. There are only human movies and Perry's comedy is the sugar he uses to serve up some harsh universal realities. In "Madea's Family Reunion," Perry wrote one of the most heart-wrenching and pivotal cinematic scenes I have ever experienced, in which the now adult daughter confronts her mother for dressing her up and handing her over to be raped by the mother's husband. I haven't seen the movie in nearly two decades and I can still picture the way the daughter describes her mother running a brush through her hair. In her speech, the character reflects so many of the feelings that I felt towards my own mother, who drove me despite my protests out into the wilderness and left me alone with her husband to be sexually abused. Sitting there watching "Madea's Family Reunion," I understood that I was not alone in surviving what I had endured. Tyler Perry movies contain absurd, slapstick physical, cross-dressing, foul-mouthed, tough love humor, but they also deal with real human pain.
"Chicken & Biscuits" by Douglas Lyons is silly without being absurd, full of family drama, but deals with none of the trauma that can be found in Perry's films - for me that is a fundamental difference. Like Perry's movies, "Chicken & Biscuits" is a feel-good comedy featuing a primarily black cast and centers around a black family and black culture. Yet to call it a black play like calling Perry's movies black movies would be erroneous. It has all the universal appeal of a "Family Matters" or "Full House" episode with its pointedly obvious themes and heartfelt conflict resolution. If you are looking to leave the theater feeling the shared joy of a family reunion, "Chicken & Biscuits" will leave you with that warm and fuzzy feeling. However, if you're looking for characters to actually dive deep into their family dynamics or to explore the pain of their newfound revelation - well, "Chicken & Biscuits" is NOT a Tyler Perry movie.
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