Review: ‘Hypocrisy of Justice’ is a musical riff on Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’
By Hannah Edgar
Oct 09, 2022 at 12:20 pm
Transplant Richard Wright’s “Native Son” to today and one will find much more to retain than to update.
In “Hypocrisy of Justice: Sights and Sounds from the Black Metropolis,” however — composer-drummer Dana Hall and writer-director Cheryl Lynn Bruce’s musical-theatrical riff on the 1940 novel — faithfulness isn’t the M.O. The creative team instead takes Wright’s story as a starting point, a travel guide to the double-binds of Black American life.
“Hypocrisy’s” treatment of “Native Son” more than allows the suite to step into its own as a stand-alone work, eschewing plot but nonetheless invoking Wright’s balance between Bigger Thomas’s interior and exterior worlds. “Hypocrisy’s” narrator, played by actor Malcom Banks (“Chicago P.D.,” Youngblood in Congo Square’s 2018 “Jitney”), is Bigger Thomas, but, as Bruce’s script reminds throughout, he’s one of many Biggers, trying to navigate daily life in the shadow of high-profile, dignity-less deaths of other Black men and women.