See Isaiah Johnson's dynamic Mister live in 'The Color Purple' at Broadway's Jacobs Theatre. The point of the whole piece is we hope for a better world. I wanted to create a character people could recognize and understand and hope better for. And he’s showing his point of view about himself too in that moment, but in Celie’s case, she’s a woman and that’s the bottom of the totem pole. You’re black and you’re poor-we have no power. This is our life you can curse me all you want but it’s not going to do any good. However, he impregnates and marries Eleanor Jane. What I love about the climax at the Easter dinner scene is Mister says, ‘you can’t curse nobody because you’re black, you’re poor, you’re ugly and you’re a woman.’ And he’s not name calling in that moment, he’s teaching her that life doesn’t get better than this for any of us. Stanley Earl: Stanley Earl is the charming white man with whom Sofia has a relationship. I wanted to communicate a character that a lot of women in the audience could identify with some on some level and bring honor and truth to the emotional journey that led the characters to do what they do. The last thing that inspired this character was my own personal, overwhelming observance of the state of black men in American culture-historically and presently. I wanted to know (in our lifetime and in a nonfictional way) what point of view did that person have? I want you to call me Mister.’ It really expanded the novel of The Color Purple in my imagination.Īs for Charles Manson, I really wanted to know a bit more about the mentality of someone who felt they didn’t get a fair shake in life and whose innocent was destroyed without their permission. There was a scene in the novel where he tells his wife, ‘You’re not good enough to call me by my name. It’s a pretty graphic novel that goes into detail about being a part of a generational system of oppression-men who are abusive to their wives and how their sons grow up abusive-and she explores what that’s like in this one family.
The Third Life of Grange Copeland is a really beautiful book that helped because it was unofficially Mister’s background, and the background of the men in The Color Purple.
I had three novels I used for source material: The Color Purple (obviously) Alice Walker’s first novel called The Third Life of Grange Copeland (which was suggested to me by our amazing assistant director, Sarita Moore), and a biography of Charles Manson told through the first person.
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