Lighting the Darkness :: Johnny Lee Davenport on 'Thurgood'

Johnny Lee Davenport makes an impression no matter what he's doing, be it the assorted roles he's had with the Actor's Shakespeare Project, with which he's been associated since he arrived in Boston, or his work in television and film. Davenport certainly made a deep and lasting impression with his work in the Huntington Theatre Company's literally dazzling production of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"; just as luminous was Davenport's turn as a closeted preacher who burst out in spectacular fashion -- in the matter of footwear as much as of approach -- in last season's outrageous and uproarious production of "Bootycandy" by the SpeakEasy Stage Company.

Now the actor is poised for another indelible role, though this time one that emanates gravitas rather than razor-sharp levity. He'll be portraying Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Justice on the United States Supreme Court. A Lyndon Johnson appointee who served from 1967 until 1991, Thurgood was no stranger to the Court even as a young lawyer, arguing numerous cases before the bench -- most famously, Brown v. Board of Education, the case that resulted in the Court's finding that public schools nationwide were to be desegregated. (The tumult that followed in certain Southern locales made the post-marriage equality civil disobedience of Kentucky clerk Kim Davis -- whose refusal to do carry out her duties became a right-wing cause c�l�bre and made Davis a poster child for so-called "religious freedom" bills when she briefly went to jail rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples -- look like a Sunday school picnic.)

Marshall had forged a remarkable career for himself before his appointment, as a civil rights leader and attorney working with the NAACP (he founded and headed up the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund). John F. Kennedy had appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit even before Johnson made him the country's Solicitor General, a post he held for two years before Johnson then nominated him to the Supreme Court.

The play is titled "Thurgood." It's a 2006 one-man play by George Stevens, Jr., and James Earl Jones starred in its premiere at Westport Country Playhouse. That's a fact that EDGE found impossible to forget while interviewing Davenport recently; the Boston-based actor's voice is as commanding as that of Jones, and carries both warmth and an introspective quality that comes through even in print.

EDGE: Thurgood Marshall was the first African American Justice on the Supreme Court: What did his service on the Court mean to you personally?

Johnny Lee Davenport: Let me start by saying that I was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana. I was born in 1950, and as a child I remember very distinctly the whites-only fountains, and going to the back of the movie theaters, and having to get of the sidewalk -- or actually, there was a boardwalk -- when white people walked by. So I remember a lot of the restrictions under what we call the Jim Crow laws. But I was never consciously aware of Thurgood Marshall. Of course, I heard about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, but Thurgood Marshall wasn't something I was aware of until later in life. So, I had no idea he was such an unsung hero, as I call him, of the civil rights movement. As I found out later, he actually is called 'Mr. Civil Rights.' He worked from the inside of the system. He wanted to -- he did use the law to change this world. That's very important to me, and that's one of the reasons I'm doing the play.

EDGE How should we compare Thurgood Marshall's contributions to American jurisprudence compared to Clarence Thomas?

Johnny Lee Davenport: Clarence Thomas? You know, as African Americans we never really had, at least in my world, we never had a very high opinion of Clarence Thomas, so I'm really not aware of -- all we heard was the negative stuff... so I really don't have an awareness of what Clarence Thomas did. My concern right now -- you know what my concern is? That we're in a situation in the court system where Obama was not able to nominate a Supreme Court judge. When Nixon became president for his first four years, Nixon nominated four Supreme Court judges. We're in that same situation right now, where our president-elect is going to be probably nominating four Supreme Court judges during his first term.

I just want to show that what goes around comes around; if we don't make changes we're going to keep being brought into the same places that we've been before. I think that if people who've been aware will listen closely to this story that I tell of Thurgood Marshall, there was a stand that needed to happen. Not in a violent protest way, but in a way that works the system from the inside, and we've got to use our vote. The vote was so important in Thurgood's life -- getting the vote for minorities. The Smith v. Allwright decision [the ruling in a case that Marshall argued before the Court as a lawyer in 1944], which overturned the Texas laws against Negroes voting in the primaries, was very important. So that's where I'm at with that.

EDGE: It sounds like Thurgood Marshall's story is more important right now than even it would have been a few months ago.

Johnny Lee Davenport: Absolutely. And young people don't know who he is. I was just doing a play, "Akeelah and the Bee," and I would tell some of the younger people that were in that that I was getting ready to do a show on Thurgood Marshall, and they had no clue as to who he is and what his effect was in our lives.

EDGE: What does justice mean now for African Americans? Is it different than it was on Nov. 7?

Johnny Lee Davenport: Oh, I guess you should ask people like Trayvon Martin's parents. Justice seems so arbitrary today, and in Thurgood Marshall's time he believed that the justice in the law was the way to make the change. And now it seems so arbitrary in many, many, many ways, and it appears that it's just going to get more loose. The whole thing about the Supreme Court is that as a par of the federal government, they decided which laws were legal, and now it's gonna seem like the states are taking more of that responsibility. It's going to be more and more varied and arbitrary between each and every state. I mean, look at the law that has just been [almost] overturned in North Carolina, with the gender issues. It's a ball of confusion, is all I can say.

EDGE: And more divisive.

Johnny Lee Davenport: Yeah... it's divisive, and more so because we don't seem, as minorities, don't seem to have a voice that will speak for us and will demand that the laws of this country be adhered to and followed by the states.

EDGE: There's quite a lot of pushback from the right when it comes to findings from the courts that they take to be "activist" rather than a strict interpreting of existing law - or at any rate, when judges disagree with the right's interpretations of exiting law. Preparing for this play, have you gotten a sense as to whether it's appropriate for a Supreme Court justice to be doing anything more than strictly interpreting existing law?

Johnny Lee Davenport: I heard on NPR yesterday a bit about some of the people that Trump will have to choose from for [the next] Supreme Court justice position [as a replacement for the late Antonin Scalia]. They were unequivocally all very conservative. It's gonna be ugly, and it's gonna slant to the right. It's frustrating, but I'm hoping that from this play will come some understanding of what has to happen in order to being true justice to every individual in this country - not just to minorities, but to all people.

EDGE: This is a one-man play. Is that intimidating for you?

Johnny Lee Davenport: Yes.

[Laughter]

EDGE: But it's also more intimate, isn't it?

Johnny Lee Davenport: It could be a play, because it's so many facts and so many actual sessions that are depicted within the courts themselves, that it could easily be a talking head, lecture kind of play, but it's not. We're making it very intimate and very personal, even though it takes place in an auditorium at Howard University; I'm breaking that fourth wall as often as I can, and I'm making it very immediate so it's not like a history of some man in the past.

What I'm trying to do is invoke the spirit Justice Marshall in saying that he needs to say these words now because of what we are gong through in the present. It's an invocation of his spirit and his need to make things equal.

EDGE: Do you feel him talking to you or through you?

Johnny Lee Davenport: That's the goal.

EDGE: How well does the script service that goal for you?

Johnny Lee Davenport: Fairly well. Once I surrender, as an actor, and try to immerse myself in the situation, trying to imagine myself going through what he has gone through, it's very easy to -- hopefully -- to feel what he felt. It is a challenge, however: It's 45 pages of just me. We've got one voice over that we got Ben Evett to do; he plays the voice of Justice Earl Warren when he brings down his Brown v. The Board of Education decision. But other than that, it's just me.

EDGE: Speaking of intimidating... you're following in the footsteps of James Earl Jones, who originated the role, and Laurence Fishburne, who was in the play when it was filmed for broadcast by HBO. Does that weigh on you at all?

Johnny Lee Davenport: I haven't seen either. I respect and admire both of those actors, but I'm doing this play. This is not what they did; it's what I'm doing now. I just did [the stage version of] "Akeelah and the Bee," which, Larry Fishburne also did the film. It was like, "Okay, so you're doing another Larry Fishburne." No, I'm doing Johnny Lee Davenport.

EDGE: How did you come to be cast in the role?

Johnny Lee Davenport: [New Repertory Theatre Artistic Director] Jim Petosa, maybe a year and an half or two years ago, we were talking during the intermission of a show I was attending at New Rep. He actually said, 'What would you like to do?' And I said, 'I'd like to do this one-man show called "Thurgood."' About a year later he calls; he says, 'You still want to do that show?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Okay, let's do it!'

EDGE: So he not only offered you a place at the table, he asked you to bring the main course!

Johnny Lee Davenport: Well, yea. I think Petosa and the New Rep Theatre, they are in a really wonderful place in their attitude and their support of the Boston theater community. I think they're doing plays that reflect what we are in the United States today, plays that influence us -- I think that's a good thing. I think that's really cool.

EDGE: You're working with director Benny Sato Ambush on this project.

Johnny Lee Davenport: Oh, Benny and I have a long history. When Petosa and I were talking about it, I couldn't think of any other director I wanted, so I said, 'Well, it's gotta be Benny.' He has such a gentle and knowledgeable way of getting [the material] out of that talking head kind of arena, and into the more personal and real -- I guess the clich� is the real life, moment to moment, present moment [style] of play. He's just been amazing to work with, as he has been on the many plays we've done together. We have a language now that we communicate with that often doesn't need words.

EDGE: In addition to your work on the Boston stage you also have a film and TV career that includes some big movies - 'The Fugitive,' and the sequel to that. 'U.S> Marshals,' among other films, including the Boston-Based comedy 'Ted.' On TV you've been on shows like 'Law and Order,' and you've starred in a couple of made-for-TV movies. Would you say you have a 'first love' when it comes to acting on stage or in front of the camera? Which would it be, if you do?

Johnny Lee Davenport: It's a very fluid kind of thing. Film pays so much better. [But] when I get cast in a film, because I'm not an A, or a Double-A, or even a B-lister, these things often are not very rewarding to me, personally, or challenging. But when I do theater, I've been very fortunate in that I choose plays that I want to do, and plays that means something. Words are very important, and when people hear something it has to mean something. And if I don't need to do it, then I don't. For me, it's something special and rare -- I don't do a play unless I really want to do it, because it's so immediate and so direct to an audience, and it's got to have some significance, to change or to alter, and not just to entertain. I'm not a singer or dancer, although I have done so in the past. I'm a storyteller, and storytellers are made for communities; and the communities I speak to, I want to affect change in them.

EDGE: You certainly had that affect on audiences recently when you stole the show in 'Bootycandy.'

Johnny Lee Davenport: Yeah, it was different.

[Laughter]

And I love [director] Summer Williams, but when she offered me the gig it was like, I didn't know what I was getting into.

EDGE: It seems like you embraced it fully. The pastor could have been played flippantly, or as a clich�, but you made him funny and poignant.

Johnny Lee Davenport: That's my job as an actor. And I still believe that play is so important in today's time - I had no choice but to fully embrace it. I go for a truth. I don't believe there is the truth, I go for a personal truth in whatever I'm doing. I've come to understand that my personal truth often resonates somewhere within everybody else's truths. That's what's important. If you're false, then nobody's gonna listen to you.