Leroy

“Berta, Berta,” a two-character play by Angelica Chéri, was inspired by a prison work song from Parchman Farm, the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary whose harsh conditions and history of forced labor extended the nightmare of antebellum slave plantations into the 20th century.

The play, which is receiving its West Coast premiere in an Echo Theater Company production at Atwater Village Theatre directed by Andi Chapman, is set in Mississippi in 1923. The action takes place in the home of Berta (Kacie Rogers), a young widow who’s awakened in the middle of the night by a visitor from her past.

Not just any visitor, mind you, but the love of her life. Leroy (DeJuan Christopher) arrives at the threshold of her small, well-cared for home in a clamorous uproar. He’s filthy, his white shirt is covered in blood, and Berta can’t tell if he’s possessed by the devil or out of his mind.

It turns out that he’s killed a man who claimed, falsely, to have slept with her. Berta is horrified that Leroy has done something so rash and violent. He holds it as proof of the depth of his love for her. But why, Berta wants to know, did he not get in touch with her after he was released from Parchman? The crime he’s committed will only send him back to where, in Leroy’s own pained words, “they take the colored man to kill him from the inside out.”

Berta and Leroy exchange grievances over the futility of their love. He can’t understand how she could have married; she’s bewildered that he could have expected her to wait indefinitely for a ghost. Their passion, however, won’t be denied, no matter how angry they make each other.

The play is pitched for maximum intensity, and Chapman’s direction encourages a mythic scope — a wholly appropriate approach for a drama that leaps over the safety of realism. Amanda Knehans’ beautifully designed set, as snug as it is appealing, grounds the action in a clean and cozy domesticity. But this is just an illusion, as the production makes clear through the expressionistic wildness of the lighting (Andrew Schmedake) and sound design (Jeff Gardner).

The couple has been granted a brief reprieve from their separation. Leroy, observing an old superstition, made an oath to the awakening cicadas that he will turn himself in if he’s given the chance to make peace with Berta. She has made her own pact with the insects, asking them to restore the life of her stillborn baby, whose corpse she has held onto in the hope that the cicadas will answer her prayer.

The pressurized, supernatural stakes in such tight quarters sometimes encourage Christopher to push a little too vociferously. Berta’s home is too small to contain Leroy — and Christopher’s performance never lets us forget it. But the turbulent charge of Leroy’s voice and body language serves another purpose: keeping the character’s history as an oppressed Black man cruelly cut off from his soulmate ever in sight.

Rogers’ Berta, comfortably situated in her domestic nest, scales her performance accordingly. She is our anchor into the world of the play, reacting to Leroy’s tumultuous intrusion with suspicion and alarm. But as the intimacy grows between the characters, the performers become more relaxed and playful with each other. The Wagnerian nature of Berta and Leroy’s love settles down without losing its miraculous mystery.

The Sunday matinee I attended was a Black Out performance — an opportunity for a Black audience to experience the play in community. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris championed this concept during the initial Broadway run of his groundbreaking drama “Slave Play.” There was backlash to the idea in London, where some critics found the practice racially exclusionary. But anything that promotes the communal embrace of art, particularly among historically underrepresented groups, ought to be celebrated.

I wasn’t the only white person in the audience at “Berta, Berta” on Sunday, but I was one of just a few. When I had initially learned from the show’s publicist that the performance was specially designated, I offered to come at another time, not wanting to take a seat from a community member. But I was assured that there was room and that I was most welcome.

Listening to the play in this special environment, I was more alert to the through line of history. Although set in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era, there appeared to be little distance between the characters and the audience. Berta and Leroy’s tempestuous love games were met with amused recognition. And the threats facing the couple, to judge by the audible response to the work, were received with knowing empathy.

At a different performance, I might have been more impatient with some of the strained dramatic turns. But the production’s living bond with the audience opened my eyes to the realism inherent in this folktale romance, laden with history and floating on a song.

There were three television characters who really mattered to me as a kid: Michael, Leroy and Theo.

In elementary school, “Good Times” was the television show that most closely resembled my family. And seeing reruns of Ralph David Carter’s portrayal of a precocious young boy learning what it means to be poor, gifted and Black is what moved his Michael from fiction to family for me.

By middle school, I was no longer wearing cornrows like Gene Anthony Ray, but I tried everything else to be like his character Leroy from the television show “Fame.” For some of my classmates, the performing arts were a fun way to express themselves, and the show was inspirational. For me, it was my way out of the hood, and Leroy was the blueprint. Through the Detroit-Windsor Dance Academy, I was able to take professional dance lessons for free and ultimately earned a dance scholarship for college.

But it wasn’t a linear journey. Despite being gifted, I struggled academically and required summer classes to graduate from high school. That’s why I connected with Theo, whose challenges in the classroom were one of the running jokes on “The Cosby Show.” The family never gave up on him, and more importantly, he didn’t stop trying.

Through the jokes about his intelligence, the coming-of-age miscues (and the dyslexia diagnosis), the storylines of Theo — like those of Leroy and Michael — often reflected struggles I foolishly thought no one else was experiencing when I was growing up. It is only through distance and time are we able to see moments like those more clearly. In retrospect, the three of them were like knots I held onto on a rope I had no idea I was climbing.

This is why the Black community’s response to the death of Malcolm-Jamal Warner this week isn’t solely rooted in nostalgia but also in gratitude. We recognize the burden he’s been carrying, so that others could climb.

When “The Cosby Show” debuted in 1984, there were no other examples of a successful two-parent Black family on air. We were on television but often trauma and struggle — not love and support — were at the center of the narratives. So even though Black women had been earning law degrees since the 1800s — beginning with Charlotte E. Ray in 1872 — and Black men were becoming doctors before that, the initial response from critics was that the show’s premise of a doctor-and-lawyer Black couple was not authentically Black.

That narrow-minded worldview continued to hang over Hollywood despite the show’s success. In 1992, after nearly 10 years of “The Cosby Show” being No. 1 — and after the success of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Coming to America” — the Eddie Murphy-led project “Boomerang” was panned as unrealistic because the main characters were all Black and successful. The great Murphy took on the Los Angeles Times directly in a letter for its critique on what Black excellence should look like.

However, Black characters like Michael, Leroy and Theo had been taking on the media since the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” painted all of us as threats in 1915. It could not have been easy for Warner, being the face of so much for so many at an age when a person is trying to figure out who he is. And because he was able to do so with such grace, Warner’s Theo defined Blackness simply by being what the world said we were not. This sentiment is embodied in his last interview, when he answered the question of his legacy by saying: “I will be able to leave this Earth knowing and people knowing that I was a good person.”

In the end, that is ultimately what made his character, along with Leroy and Michael, so important to the Black community. It wasn’t the economic circumstances or family structure of the sitcoms that they all had in common. It was their refusal to allow the ugliness of this world to tear them down. To change their hearts or turn their light into darkness. They maintained their humanity and in the process gave so many of us a foothold to keep climbing higher.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

The Bundesliga champions were keen on keeping the winger but Sane rejected the offer of a contract extension.

Bayern had included Sane in their 29-man squad for the Club World Cup, which begins on 15 June.

However, he is set to complete a deal with Galatasaray in the coming days, with the Athletic, external reporting he has verbally agreed a three-year deal with the Turkish club.

Sane, who won six major trophies in four years with City, claimed three consecutive Bundesliga titles during his first three seasons at Bayern before a fourth last term.

He scored 61 goals in 220 matches for Bayern, including 13 in 45 matches last season.