No doubt about it. As Lena Younger, the matriarch in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Trezana Beverley is not going to be another mama on the couch.
That's one reason director Marion McClinton cast the Tony Award-winning, Baltimore-born actress in Center Stage's production, which begins performances Thursday.
"You're not going to see Mama, you're going to see Lena. That's about the best way of putting it," says McClinton. "Mama has become a stereotypical character that crosses many other black plays. I think [Beverley] gives her her individuality."
The phrase "mama on the couch" comes from a parody written by George C. Wolfe in his 1986 play, The Colored Museum. The spoof is a sincerest-form-of-flattery sendup of a groundbreaking 1959 drama that has achieved the rank of a modern classic.
In the process, it has become increasingly difficult to break the stereotype of Mama as a hard-working, churchgoing, tough-love kind of woman who will do anything for her children -- and who's always right.
But set aside those images of pious, hefty Claudia McNeil in the original Broadway production and 1961 movie, or indomitable Esther Rolle in the 25th anniversary production, which played the Mechanic Theatre in 1988 and was televised a year later.
At 56, and with a physique that reflects her belief in the cross-fertilization of theater and dance, Beverley is a leaner, younger Lena Younger. Nor will her Lena be a saintly paragon.
"We're not going to see St. Trezana, and I'm so glad because the other approach is so much more interesting, so much more provocative, and so much more fun to play," the actress explains. "She's not a preacher. She's more spontaneous. We see that she has questions. We see that she can be vulnerable."
Not only that, but according to McClinton, Beverley portrays Lena, flaws and all. "She doesn't sentimentalize her," he says. "You can dislike aspects of Lena as much as respect her."
A watershed production
Beverley won her Tony Award in 1977 for her charged portrayal of the Lady in Red in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. McClinton owns a videotape of the 1982 American Playhouse telecast of colored girls, but he has never seen Beverley on stage.
He did, however, see a production of colored girls that she directed at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theatre in the early 1980s, and it exerted a lasting influence on him. "She directed one of the watershed productions in Minnesota theater history," he says.
