By Melinda Miller

In “The African Company Presents Richard III,” courage and freedom meet art

The Ujima Theatre Company is beginning its 46^th season with a stand-out production of “The African Company Presents Richard III,” a play about a Black theater company in the 1800s that never reached such a milestone. 

What makes the telling of this story so engaging is playwright Carlyle Brown’s choice to focus on the people involved more than on the politics and, yes, the prejudice of the times.

The action is based on a true story, set 200 years ago in New York City: William Alexander Brown, an enterprising free Black man from the Caribbean, had a successful business that provided food and entertainment to the city’s Black community. But when he began presenting full stage productions of Shakespeare, Brown crossed an invisible line – a white one.

“The African Company Presents Richard III” dramatizes what happened next. 

The tone is set from the opening scene. Theater owner Stephen Price (Connor Graham) is white, arrogant and surprisingly contemptuous of his own audiences, calling them prostitutes, pickpockets and ignorant country people. He holds the greatest disregard for “free Negroes” and for the operators of the African Company, seeing their effort to present “Richard III” as “a cheap spectacle and tasteless novelty.”

He enlists the police (Lucas Lloyd) and powers-that-be to try shut them down with such relish that it’s hard not to hiss. But this is not Price’s story.

The perspective quickly shifts to the close-knit group that forms the African Company, to begin a deep dive into all the currents that flow through their lives. There’s Sarah (Rachel Henderson), a housemaid whose lonely employer treats her as a confidante and hired friend. 

Sarah, who can take or leave acting, tries to be a calming influence on her friend Ann (Anika Pace), who is so upset by parallels between Shakespeare and her own situation with fellow actor James Hewlett (Brian Brown) that she wants to quit the show.  

Hewlett, on the other hand, would never quit. Having spent a good part of his life pretending to be something he is not – including a ruse to escape from slavery — he understands the transformational power of theater on and off the stage.  

He’s a good match the theater company’s owner, Billy Brown (Johnny Rowe), who also has been through too much for too long to give in to Price’s pressures. He’s a fight fire with fire kind of man, even if it means getting burned.

Then there is the Bard himself, Papa Shakespeare (Gerald Ramsey). Back in the West Indies, he says, his master named him “Shakespeare” to mock him, because they didn’t speak the same language. What the so-called master didn’t know was that Papa was also a griot – a keeper of history and stories – “so the name fits.”

“Where I come from,” Papa Shakespeare explains, “a book is a living man.”

Carlyle Brown’s play is like that griot, a living representation of the people who dared to live free in a world that held slaves, who dared to make art, and who dared to perform their version of the culture that was thrust upon them. The African Company’s short existence lives on in those who continue to tell its story.

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 “The African Company Presents Richard III,” directed by Curtis Lovell, is onstage in the Lorna C. Hill Theater at Ujima Theatre Company, 429 Plymouth Ave., through Sept. 29. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 4 p.m. Tickets are $40; $30 for seniors; $20 for students and veterans, at ujimacoinc.org