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Getting your hair done, cut or installed is a routine event. It can entail some waiting and, perhaps, a few old Ebony magazines or some televised ambience: sports news, one of those Saturday-afternoon cooking shows or, maybe most entertaining, a bootleg DVD of a stage play in which a broad-shouldered, square-jawed 6-foot-6 linebacker of a woman counsels, threatens, mocks and manhandles strangers, neighbors and kin. Her name is Mabel Simmons, although most people know her as Madea, the elderly vulgarian synonymous with Tyler Perry, who since 1999 has been wearing her gray wig and flowery housedresses. Depending on how often your hair needs tending and who’s tending it, Madea could be a regular, involuntary part of your life, like secondhand smoke or traffic.

Over 15 years, Perry has written, directed, acted in and produced more than 20 films of his own and has appeared in other people’s, too1 (that’s him as Colin Powell in “Vice”). But before he was one of America’s most successful entertainers, Perry was a star in black America. His clamored-for stage tours built an empire off Madea’s back — “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” “Madea’s Class Reunion,” “Madea Goes to Jail,” “Madea Gets a Job.”2 Lots of people saw them live. Even more saw them somewhere else, like in a barber’s chair. There are black people for whom a Tyler Perry show would be a night out and maybe their annual (or very first) trip to the theater. So he gave them their money’s worth. These are loud, long, hysterical shows in which a bunch of characters, not infrequently on a set resembling a sitcom diorama, love and leave one another, imparting morals the way a shot gets put. They aren’t quite farces, dramas or melodramas. They’re not exactly parables, musicals or church, either. They’re usually all of those things. Somebody’s mad, somebody’s cheating, somebody’s dying, somebody’s scheming. Here’s some dirt. Here’s some slapstick. Here’s a gospel song. Here’s the truth. Oh, Lord.

This cacophony of flat acting and exuberance, as well as the fact of his popularity, have started fights among both critics and civilians about Perry’s merits. Is he good for black people? Is he good at all? (A displeased review I wrote of the film version of “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” garnered ticked-off mail for years, from people certain that my not liking it meant I had to be white.) Do his plays, movies and cable sitcoms — with their bawdy cartoon carnality, billboard-size lessons, one-dimensional religiosity, rickety domestic partnerships, vituperative socioeconomic clashes, scams and vociferous, flamboyant blackness — qualify as art? (For the record, they do.)

If these disputes are musty (I, at least, can smell mold), they’re also moot, because right now a circle of young black playwrights is doing some of the most imaginative, confrontational work in the American theater, and Perry is right there at its center. Didn’t see that coming? Maybe it’s not immediately obvious. But it makes sense. He’s the biggest black playwright in America. If you were a kid, teenager or barely an adult in the 2000s, living in a black city and attracted to the stage, it would be hard for Perry not to become someone to revere, reckon with or resist.

One of these playwrights is Michael R. Jackson, who built a musical around black people’s love of Perry and his own contempt for Perry’s work. The show is “A Strange Loop,” a ferocious, pungent Off Broadway hit from the summer. It’s about an aspiring playwright who’s miserably gay, unhappily black and stuck in a dull job (as a theater usher) that’s keeping him from a life of creating musicals. His mother, played by a goateed man, disapproves of his art, his sexuality and his taste. Her favorite thing about his talent is that maybe he’ll use it to write a Tyler Perry show. “God sent Tyler on Earth to be our voice, along with Barack,” she intones.

“A Strange Loop” by Michael R. Jackson, performed off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in May. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Jackson has refreshed the argument over whether Perry is good for art and good for black America by asking whether Perry is good for him. The arena for that debate is a gospel number, “AIDS Is God’s Punishment,” in which the crowd-pleasing pieties of a Perry play are steered into deadly-serious satire. The set is suddenly transformed into a smaller version of the split-level houses you’d typically see in a Perry show. But upstairs, where in Perry’s world the characters would talk about or simulate sex, there’s a coffin and, framed in hellfire lighting and big as a fridge, the letters “H.I.V.” It exposes the homophobic subtext lurking in Perry’s work and calls out the moralistic finger-wagging3 the shows — and by extension the people who love them — do.

Where does Perry’s triumph leave a black person who’s skeptical of and alienated by his empire, who feels oppressed by the standard it sets and the bar it lowers? And where does that leave a person who knows all this and finds him fun anyway? These questions are currently fueling a bunch of strong, anxious shows. Perry’s name isn’t always checked, but the spirit of him is there, bouncing off the walls. He’s there in the salaciously dysfunctional couplings of Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play,” “Daddy”), in the rambunctious episodic sketches of Jordan E. Cooper (“Ain’t No Mo’ ”), in the time warps and fraying family ties of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview,” “Marys Seacole”) — as an idea, as an energy, to be channeled, harnessed and critiqued. The Tyler Perry problem is really an ancient, larger worry about blackness and how to present it. How loud is too loud? How black is too black?

Drama students are steered toward the titans of a serious American theater (O’Neill, Williams, Albee, men). A black drama student very likely arrives having been told long ago that the shoes worthiest of filling belonged to Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. These are honorable, admirable, important, comfortable shoes. But the trouble for a young black playwright in the 21st century is that even though it’s apparent that the legends are speaking for you, they might not be speaking to you. Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” was first performed 60 years ago and so concisely dramatizes a fundamental conundrum of racism and upward black mobility that it retains a sobering philosophical timelessness. And yet, for the play to achieve maximal devastation, it has to stay in 1959.4

Wilson has been dead for more than a decade but was sacrosanct even when he was very much among us. His 10 plays took as their project the black experience — excuse me, The. Black. Experience — dramatizing it for each decade of the 20th century. In 1911 (“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”), in the 1920s (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”), during the Depression (“The Piano Lesson”), in the late 1950s (“Fences”), in the Clinton-era 1990s (“Radio Golf”). The grain, grind and wonder of African-American life — of estrangement and reunion, assimilation and isolation, flesh and blood and ghosts — was envisioned as high literature and American tragedy. A character could arrive light as silk and leave rough as burlap, because the past is never quite done with anybody in a Wilson show.

But what does Wilson have to say about the present? What if a writer in 2019 wants to make a connection to right now? To write what she knows, likes and has been thinking about in addition to what she has been taught? The appeal of Perry is that he works in a kind of permanent present, cramming it full of nonliterary problems like nosy neighbors, nasty kids, marriage counseling and horny old ladies. Philandering husbands, long-suffering wives and foster-care predators come in for a tsking. He conflates soap opera and choir practice. In some shows, somebody offstage will start playing a keyboard in the middle of a scene as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

His mix of gratuitousness and blatancy shoots right out of the Chitlin Circuit,5 a century-old touring route through black theaters (or just black spaces) in black communities that emerged in the 1920s, at an apex of racial segregation, when the labor of black art (securing that space, traveling to it, being paid) could put your life at risk. Theater made on the circuit, yesterday and today, tends to be so present-minded that it can be ephemeral — as close to news as to art. But the bulletins these shows provide, along with the singing and dancing and talent, acknowledge to black audiences that they exist, that some aspect of their lives is worthy of reflection. Occasionally something comes along and sharply aligns spiritual pathos with earthly desire and becomes a runaway-train phenomenon, the way “Mama, I Want to Sing!” Vy Higginsen and Ken Wydro’s musical about the church mouse who becomes a pop star, did in the 1980s and 1990s.

On the Chitlin Circuit, black life isn’t aspirational — it’s deluxed: criminality, venality, lust, vengeance, Jesus, eye rolls, neck rolls, dinner rolls, murder, gossip, mispronunciations and hope. A lot of regional touring black plays from the 1980s and 1990s were crisis-oriented, about drugs and sex and poverty. (“Pathologizing” is a worried descriptor that’s been used.) Perry’s plays reupholstered most of the rawness of catastrophe with bougie padding and the pathology with types. His work is full of arrivistes and the nouveau upper middle class, people who seem to have sprung as much from “Dynasty” as from “Good Times” and the pages of Black Enterprise magazine, people brought low (and back home) by pride or vanity or greed, by an abusive spouse. These are worlds empty of politics, not just racial politics but intraracial strife. A white man tends to be the least of a black woman’s problems — usually, it’s the black person she married. Class and comportment are what might send characters to the wrestling ring.

These are worlds also empty of white people, as black as the worlds of the people who’ve come to see them. A night of watching a sliver of our daily difficulty boxed up as drama, of laughing at our most ludicrous, obstreperous, reduced selves, selves that among black people are recognizable at worst as hyperbolically human, could be a comfort. There is art in that, too.

But Perry’s descendants are asking what changes when hyperbole is presented in front of white visitors who might receive it as fact. How soon would these visitors despoil all this unspooled, undressed blackness? How soon could your black Eden be transformed into a carnival of stereotypes? How soon would so much casual self-expression curdle into the sort of shame that leaves you reaching for a fig leaf? That shame, that discomfort, these visitors are part of a vital project for this generation of playwrights. They’re interrogating a new pathology: What if white people are the disease?

In 1996, two years before Perry successfully staged his first play, August Wilson delivered a grand, polarizing address to a group of theater professionals that he called “The Ground on Which I Stand,”6 in which he argued that in order to preserve artistic freedom, it was in the best interest of the black playwright to work apart from white people. The American theater was the dominion of white experience and a corruptive purveyor of whiteness. His conclusions were spiritual and cultural as well as economic. Black venues wouldn’t survive without black work. But really, he believed that black artists owe it to history to stay in the neighborhood and create among themselves.

The time has come for black playwrights to confer with one another, to come together to meet each other face to face, to address questions of aesthetics and ways to defend ourselves from the naysayers who would trumpet our talents as insufficient to warrant the same manner of investigation and exploration as the majority. We need to develop guidelines for the protection of our cultural property, our contributions and the influence they accrue. It is time we took the responsibility for our talents in our own hands.

His audience that day would have been the well-meaning white people who helped make his reputation, who published his plays. He was biting hands. In an article for The New Yorker early the following year, Henry Louis Gates Jr. surveyed the aftershocks, implications and ironies of the speech.7 For one thing, this black theater Wilson was calling for already existed. It’s the Chitlin Circuit, and despite the poor esteem in which it’s held, it’s what black audiences wanted to see. Wilson was demanding a loftier black theater, a Foie Gras Circuit.

In the meantime, while the other black artists would be heading back to their communities and saving the arts, Wilson would stay behind, filling the void he’d be creating. With no detectable sense of burden, Wilson informs Gates that his connection to white people was born of educational necessity. Basically, he excels at explaining his people to theirs. “The rush is now on to do anything that’s black,” he says. “Largely through my plays, what the theaters have found out is that they had this white audience that was starving to get a little understanding of what was happening with the black population, because they very seldom come into contact with them, so they’re curious.”

More than 20 years later, the rush is back on. Producers aren’t as scared of intense, eccentric plays about black life, and audiences are eager to hear from original new voices. There’s also a separate rush among black playwrights who want white people at their shows, in order to shake the ground on which we stand. Their work is being put on in American theater’s capital, where a mostly black audience is no guarantee, even for a black show. Rather than strike out into some new territory or retreat back into the Urban Theater Circuit (which is what we’re supposed to call the Chitlin Circuit now), these playwrights are taking Wilson’s idea of radical separatism in the opposite direction and yet a step further. They’re addressing the relatively few black people in their audience, either pretending the white people aren’t there or yanking comfort away from everybody.

A white audience is a foil for the work and factors into the achievement. At a Tyler Perry play or movie, a black audience has been welcomed, serenaded, flattered and understood. What happens when the chaos of Perry’s realness is presented antagonistically on a New York stage?

Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” starts off as a sex comedy among three interracial couples exploring erotic fantasies on a plantation. The power dynamics in these relationships are slavery’s, and they are on the rocks just as Perry’s “The Marriage Counselor” and “Why Did I Get Married?” are about love going bad.8 But Harris is playing games right out of the gate. “Slave Play” opens with one of its characters bent over, twerking, in her antebellum rags, to Rihanna’s “Work.” It’s not unlike the way the cast of a Perry show is introduced singing or, in the middle of a scene, could start doing the Bankhead Bounce or Milly Rock. In “Slave Play,” it’s a way to shatter the mannerism in theater from a bygone period, to connect those clothes and the dire straits of its era to our moment. But having her twerk to “Work” sends a wink to the black people in the audience: It’s about to go down.

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview” opens with a scene of sitcom-like black domesticity whose look and language could be from one of Perry’s plays. A woman is stressfully setting the table while her husband and sister kind of assist. But something with her isn’t right. Her well-to-do polish feels like a worried parody of bougieness. In the second act, the lights dim on the simple comedy we were watching, and unseen white characters begin talking over it, talking about it and then try to talk like it, speaking the way they think these characters would speak: “Fine, Mama! Fine! I will run off with Antoine.” And: “He play the sax and he love me.” It’s a blackness these white spectators presume just by looking at black people on stage. They’re not seeing Huxtable-adjacent characters, the way I am. They look at these polished black people and see “Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns.” It’s that junkie itch for the thrill of minstrel blackness: white people impersonating black people for their own amusement.

The possession culminates in a showdown between the watched and the watchers. When it’s all over, identities have been turned inside out, the set has been demolished and the daughter of the black family is inviting “the folks who identify as white” to leave their seats in the audience and “come up here to where my family has always been,” to “let me and my family go out to where you’ve always been.” And some white folks in the audience actually do go up and stand in the black people’s place, in a house that a race war has trashed, so that whoever else has remained seated (ideally nonwhite people) can gaze upon them. The riot we’ve been watching isn’t funny anymore. For the smattering of black people left behind — O.K., for me — the coup of spectatorship and the consequent intimacy was painfully awkward. Our blackness wasn’t unburdened the way it would be at a Perry show. It was powerfully unbearable. It made me wish I were up there with the white people.

America needs a black theater. But black theater needs to be all over America, challenging, questioning, provoking, freaking people out, because these actually aren’t only black plays. They’re plays about race, and the experience of one race watching another, watching it not only suffer and struggle but also inspect itself. The rush Wilson was talking about is also simply a rush of nerve and style, avant-gardism on Tyler Perry drugs. These younger authors prioritize structure, pacing, moral suspense and authentic weirdness that Perry’s plays don’t have; they believe in rigor. But they seem to have at least considered what might happen when you take Perry’s blackness-for-black-people and make it yours. His bawdiness, flamboyance and excess, his ruthless sense of entertainment and spontaneity: It’s alive in this new work, sloshing around with all its other allusions, pungent on the tongue. Maybe Perry’s not a great artist. But there is great art in him. There must be, because right now some visionary playwrights are using it to make their own.