The Great White Way — already under attack for its lack of diversity — is now featuring the N-word on several stages.
Audra McDonald utters the word as Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill.” Chuck Cooper says it in “Act One” in a scene in which young Moss Hart has a part in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” And everyone in “Of Mice and Men” uses it to describe a black co-worker.
While much has been made of the lack of black actors in a Cotton Club scene in “Bullets Over Broadway,” the N-word isn’t causing controversy because all three plays deal with the era before the Civil Rights movement and before the term was widely perceived as a hateful slur.
“In every case, it was appropriate,” said my theater-going source who saw all three plays. “It was the word that was used at the time.”