A CHRISTMAS DANCE FOR JOHNNIE MAE
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It’s Christmas Eve and poor Johnnie Mae, once a talented tap dancer, has been confined to her wheelchair for ten years. Her husband, Cliff, is a philanderer and a compulsive gambler. Many times, we are told, he has gambled away the furniture, and this is one of those times. He has also gambled away Johnnie Mae’s soul. That’s right, her soul. And the devil, or the devil’s broker or whoever he is, comes to collect her soul on this holy night. Johnnie Mae’s ready to go, too, but Cliff suddenly comes home and repents and professes his love and snatches Johnnie Mae right up out of her wheelchair and dances with her. Blackout. The next morning, Christmas morning, it turns out that it was all a dream. Cliff is in the wheelchair instead. But the family is happy, and the tree is decorated, and it’s a merry Christmas after all.
I can’t apologize for giving away the plot here since it doesn’t make any sense anyway. Playwright Shirley Hardy-Leonard spends a good hour and a half laying out the exposition, and then another hour filling in the revelations, reversals, and flashbacks that supposedly justify the exposition. It’s a plot that serves itself and little else. And it doesn’t even do that well. In the end, it’s all a dream. None of the problems in Johnnie Mae’s family are resolved, because they never really existed. Unless, on the other hand, it wasn’t a dream, and Cliff’s redemption worked a miracle that allowed him to take Johnnie Mae’s place in the wheelchair. In that case, the message of this play is that there is no hope, outside of hoping for a miracle. Then again, maybe there’s no message at all, and A Christmas Dance for Johnnie Mae is only a shoddy combination of The Gift of the Magi and The Devil and Daniel Webster, adapted for black theater.
Granted, A Christmas Dance for Johnnie Mae supplies fresh stuffing for the Christmas slot on the subscription ticket, which is crucial for a black theater. But the real problem, as I see it, is that this play doesn’t contribute to black culture so much as it exploits it. The character of Cal, the satanic Santa, only capitalizes on an interest in occult spookiness, more popularly exploited in films like Black Exorcist. And there are the stereotypes–the long-suffering matriarch, the wayward husband, the sexually spunky grandfather–that don’t reflect black society, but simply cartoon it.
