I THINK IT’S GONNA WORK OUT FINE
In I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, Idris Ackamoor and Rhodessa Jones are the angels of Ike and Tina Turner–who, though they’re not dead, travel in such different circles from the rest of us that they might as well be. Of course, because Ike and Tina are still very much alive, Ed Bulfins’s play (written with the help of Ackamoor, Jones, and director Brian Freeman) deals instead with a fictional R & B couple, Prince and Rita, whose life story sounds remarkably like the Turners’. (If the story doesn’t tip you off, the shows title should: Ike and Tina Turner recorded a song called “Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” on Sue Records in the 60s.)
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Ed Bullins’s script, which uses elements from the Turners’ lives and drops them into a story line remarkably similar to the 1954 version of A Star Is Born (except that no one dies in the end), pulls no punches when it comes to the ways white businessmen exploit black performers. “I know cats who were paid in liquor,” Prince growls at one point in the story, “in drugs, in cars, even in women.” At another point he says bitterly: “What is a nigger without a woman? The white man keeps everything else for himself” Such honest expression of feelings is bracing and, I’m told, very much in line with Ed Bullins’s earlier works from the 70s–Death List, The Theme Is Blackness, and It Bees Dat Way. Most had a black militancy about them all but missing in theater now, in the still-half-asleep post-Reagan era.
