The actor always intended for the Ossie Davis play to mark his return to Broadway post-Hamilton.
“I said, ‘It would be nice to doPurlie Victorious.’
Surely somebody will take a meeting with us on this thing.
Leslie Odom Jr. and the cast of ‘Purlie Victorious’.Marc J. Franklin
It’s the day after the Tony Awards, if not now, then when?'”
But it wasn’t as simple as Odom hoped.
“We couldn’t get a meeting,” he continues.
Leslie Odom Jr. in ‘Purlie Victorious’.Marc J. Franklin
“We tried for a few years to get the meeting.
My agent and I called once or twice a year every single year to see if he would reconsider.
And he didn’t.
Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young in ‘Purlie Victorious’.Marc J. Franklin
It’s taken all these years.”
And he yearned to rectify that.
“Plays are meant to be seen and heard,” he muses.
The cast of ‘Purlie Victorious’.Marc J. Franklin
“A play is not, in my opinion, in its intended format to be read only.
At the very least, it’s to be read aloud.
They’re meant to come to life, unlike a novel which happens in our imagination.
The cast of ‘Purlie Victorious’.Marc J. Franklin
We’re supposed to see and hear these things.
That’s not something you manufacture.
“I’m excited to discover why it took years,” he continues.
‘Purlie Victorious’.Marc J. Franklin
There was something about the summer of 2015 that was made for that show’s maximum potential.
“Come see it while you might,” Odom quips.
“The way things are going, we’re a few months away from this play being banned.
There’s not a day in this country that I can forget that I’m a Black man.”
Still, that doesn’t mean the play is tragedy or trauma porn.
In fact, Odom wants to be sure audiences know it’s the opposite.
“I want to have a foot-stomping good time, and I want to be moved.”
“And he realized early on that it was just too painful to ask an audience to sit through.
“They were real cultural ambassadors, not only for the Black community, but for American society.
These are foundational moments in American culture that these two are at the center at.”
“There’s no one I trust more to give me feedback about the production as a whole.”
“We’ll see if that’s what we want to tackle next.
But this felt right, going back to the original source material and revisiting it.
Whatever happens next, this is what needed to happen first.”
