conceived & written by Paul Outlaw
a new experimental play with music
HISTORY
I grew up in the projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but my siblings and I spent several weeks almost every summer “down South” at our maternal grandmother’s home in North Carolina.
Grandma Bettie loved to show us old family photographs and sometimes we would take a drive down to Quitsna Landing to visit the place where she and my mother were raised and look at the headstones in the Indian Woods cemetery near the old Gospel Oak and the once-neglected Outlaw plantation home.
Mom and Grandma would recite the generations of our family tree, repeating tragic
and often bizarre stories about long-dead ancestors and cousins, the offspring and descendants of slaves and the people who owned them as property.
The Late, Late Show fictionalizes this family history, making it the main ingredient in an occult brew, seasoned with a little Southern superstition, a touch of the secret history of LA’s Central Avenue district (see box below), a generous helping of more than a century of American music (traditional, classic and original), and my own take on the vampire metaphor—with its themes of enslavement and, conversely, empowerment; addiction; fear of aging and disease; and its lurid fantasies of rape and revenge.
My grandmother lived to be 103 years old, my mother 95; but their tales and others like them will be consigned to oblivion unless we continue to pass them down, in the form of our choosing. I choose live performance and music and look forward to sharing them with you.
Paul Outlaw, January 2014
Left: Joseph Walter Smallwood, his wife (née Bettie Outlaw Bond) and their daughter Mary Bettie (Paul Outlaw's mother); top: Indian Woods Township, Bertie County, NC, 1855; bottom: "Liberty Hall," the Outlaw plantation home built in the 1850s.
For urban drifters, a place like Brother’s was a natural point of rest. An after-hours lounge run by a large, amaiable black man, Brother’s was a secret temple of exotica. You entered an alley just off Central, crossed a boardwalk that led up to a home, and you arrived at some other place. Ottomans and cushions lay low on the ground, and in every room people reclined in shadows. “If you’ve never spent a night in Sudan, then by all means spend an evening at Brother’s Rendezvous,” enthused a nightclub critic. “Cosmopolitan to the nth degree, your lawyer, doctor, grocer or banker may be seen relaxing there almost any morning.”
Henry “Brother” Williams greeted people at the door dressed in a silk Chinese robe; on his arm was his lover, Aristide Chapman. Charles Brown regularly dropped by and performed, as did piano player Art Tatum, Mabel Scott, Gladys
Bentley, singer Ernie Andrews and many others.
In 1948 the city council cracked down on local nightlife, ruling that cocktail lounges had to adopt a minimum standard for lighting; low wattage, they seemed to
believe, lead to low morals. A secret club, Brother''s ignored the mandate; here people saw better in the dark. At Brother’s you might spot someone you knew from the outside world, someone you thought you recognized...in a place where all could spend freely the money they earned. Here people with no shortage of disposable income could practice a freedom that Los Angeles had promised then and then abandoned. It was a place where some discovered who they really were.
RJ Smith, The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African American Renaissance