ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION.(The Color Purple)(Theater Review)

In 1973, Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to Eatonville, Florida, to place a tombstone on the unmarked grave of the African-American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Walker's 1982 novel, "The Color Purple," has now been made into a musical (at the Broadway), and its abused, humiliated, and stifled heroine, Celie (the compelling LaChanze), embodies one of Hurston's trenchant observations: "People can be slave-ships in shoes." The opening image of the musical is perhaps its most resonant. Celie and her sister, Nettie, as children, sit in an ancient tree clapping their hands and chanting doggerel:

Papa don't like no screamin' round here, No lip from da woman when they chug dat beer.

Silence is at issue in the girls' game and in their lives. In a heartbeat, Celie has lost her song. She is now fourteen, and her stepfather has just impregnated her for the second time. Both children are taken from her. By then, she has also lost her mother, her father, and is about to lose her sister; and when she's married off to the cruel Mister (Kingsley Leggs) for the price of a cow, for all intents and purposes she has lost her life. For most of the show, the homely Celie is a domestic drudge. Her husband calls her ugly ; out of self-abasing dutifulness, she hides herself away. Because she has been systematically stripped of her identity, she cannot announce herself to the world. (The set designer, John Lee Beatty, hints at this by reproducing on the curtain one of Celie's letters to God, in which the words "I am" are crossed out. The letter continues, "Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.") Celie's chronic and emblematic problem, in other words, revolves around what Hurston called "the muteness of slavery."

Song is, naturally, crucial to every musical, but for the African-American story it's doubly important, linked as it is to the achievement of individuality through centuries of subjugation. To sing solo is to take a stand, to take up space in the world, to broadcast your identity, which is why the agent of liberation in Walker's story is a free-spirited blues singer named Shug Avery (the vivacious Elisabeth Withers-Mendes, making an impressive Broadway debut). Shug knows her own desires and acts on them; she is a whole woman with a whole name. "Not like Nettie, not like Sofia / Not like nobody else up in here / Shug Avery," Celie sings. Shug is introduced to Celie's household by Mister, who has a jones for her, but she turns out to be Celie's Sapphic salvation instead. "You hush my mouth and still me / With a song I never heard," Shug sings to Celie. As one might expect of a product with Oprah Winfrey's imprimatur, at the finale the engines of positivity pump at full blast and the blessings of abundance rain down. Celie is reunited with her long-lost sister and children (Nettie has raised them in Africa, natch); she has money in the bank, love in her heart, and an identity to celebrate. "I'm gonna sing out / Sing out / I believe I have inside of me / Everything I need to live a bountiful life," she exults.

Overamplified, overheated, and overhyped, this noisy production is about presentation not penetration. Beatty has designed some gorgeous backdrops--an ochre Southern field and a folkloric African village. Donald Byrd's choreography of the life of the church and of the field has its dashing moments. (When the focus shifts to Africa and the see-through bodices of dancing natives, however, it becomes sensationally inauthentic: Olympic gymnastics meets National Geographic.) Brian MacDevitt's lighting gives the show a beautiful lustre. Still, it seems to me that the production team hasn't thought deeply enough about what lies underneath their story; they don't appear to understand their own theme--or, at least, how to make more out of it than generic Broadway entertainment. Marsha Norman's libretto is a kind of color-me-purple comic-book outline: it gives us the externals of the plot but not, in any meaningful sense, the internal life of the characters, who function more as anecdotes than as dramatic influences on Celie. As a ...