He plays everything with the precision you'd expect from such a consummate talent, but the double act of drawing us into his autobiographical story and then keeping us at arm's length is puzzling. Most of us have already spent our lives watching him embody others. “Like They Do” is a precious time just with him. Why waste it?
As for the physical presentation, there's nothing great about it. Set designer Neil Patel never decorates the dull, rectangular Perelman stage of his Performing Arts Center with more than just a desk and a chair or two. Behind Fishburne, a lighted frame that mirrors a movie theater screen floats just above the stage floor. Aside from the occasional footage of Fishburne's ancestry, its solidity does nothing to warm us to his story. The theater is only for actors.
Fishburne, like a charming star, powerfully delivers a huge amount of speech. He details his own childhood, moving between the mentally unstable powers of his mother, Hattie, and the boisterous Casanova of his father, Big Fish. Start the show with that. Their eccentricity, and perhaps a pinch of performative fantasy projected by Hattie, propels Fishburne's involvement in the theatrical arts.
Fishburne remains lively and tactile. We see him touching, stroking, and lifting objects that aren't actually there. He's gracious and generous, always asking the audience how we're doing, and tempering the preachiness of his TED talks with a “Leading His Rainbow'' comfort. During these two hours and 20 minutes of his life, we are his friends, family, and even his “baby.” Fishburne maintains this para-familiarity even as he dips into more difficult truths, particularly the truth that he was sexually abused by Hattie as a child. Never one to leave his audience unsettled for too long, he repeats such startling revelations with a quip: “More on that later.”
“More” is the operative word. Because these are not short sentences that Fishburne wrote for us. It consists of sentences and legato soliloquy. Thankfully, director Leonard Foglia (Fishburne's longtime collaborator) keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, but the challenges are obvious. Case in point, at the performance I went to, Fishburne repeatedly called out to the stage manager in the shadows:
He comes in all races and ages, adopts innovative dialects and rhythms like the great autodidacts of yesteryear, Whoopi Goldberg, John Leguizamo, and Anna Deavere Smith, and Fishburne plays the show's I am grateful to all of them. In a scene involving one of those supporting characters, he becomes Joseph, a man who endures unimaginable hardship as he attempts to escape from New Orleans for Baton Rouge during Hurricane Katrina. In real life, Fishburne was born in 2005 when he was living in the French Quarter and fundraising for post-hurricane relief. In another scene, Fishburne plays Marcus, an American living in Australia who proudly runs a brothel, traffickers for pleasure, and marries a beautiful sex worker. In real life, one of Fishburne's daughters, Montana, worked as a sex worker and adopted the name Chippy D in adult films. These are rich and thoughtful depictions, but talent is no longer something he has to prove. Presumably he has something to do with these stories, but Fishburne never reveals it.
As the play reaches its conclusion, the real Laurence Fishburne comes back to us and asks permission to dig into his parents' story (as if we weren't telepathically begging him). . Once he clears Hattie of his mental disorder, he crouches deeper and lower still, sitting cross-legged on the stage floor. He brings us close to eye level, no longer a Hollywood star or a theatrical giant, but playing a son obsessed with the memories of his mother, complex, impossible and terrifying.
Although his initial promise of constant vulnerability isn't fully fulfilled, Fishburne does what he always does in his films, pouring out parts of his heart and letting others know. told the stories of people.
like a moviethrough March 31 at New York's Perelman Performing Arts Center. 2 hours 20 minutes with a break. paknique.org.