Tyler Perry, as the God-fearing granny Madea, taps into his audience's hopes and anxieties
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All this is seasoned with raucous gag lines, rafter-raising gospel and R&B songs, an inspirational Christian message (Shirley, on her deathbed and surrounded by the family, sings to her last breath — then reappears as a white-robed angel ascending to Heaven to finish the song) and the alternately jokey and hectoring presence of Madea. She is the irresistible center of gravity, dispensing both specific advice ("You've been tricked!" she tells the guy with the pushy fiancée. "Tricked by drug dealers! Get a job!") and all-purpose bromides ("If you think good things, good things got to come back to you").
But Perry's out to have fun too. He regularly steps out of character to ad-lib — chastising latecomers in the audience ("The show starts at 8. You move a little slower, you need to leave a little earlier"), joking about a co-star's bad breath and delivering impromptu movie reviews. (He praises Disney's The Princess and the Frog for having a black heroine but laments that she doesn't wind up with a black prince: "Black woman can't even have a black man in animation!") After the curtain call, he spends another 15 minutes talking to the crowd, explaining the background of the show (he wrote it after the death of his mother last year), making a pitch for Haiti relief and urging fans to see his next movie, for which he shows a trailer.
It's crude, commercial — and effective. Perry has tapped into his audience's shared experiences, hopes and worries, the need for a little escape, a little realism and a few moral lessons. I'm not part of his target audience — just as, I imagine, most of Perry's fans can't relate much to the glib, angst-ridden, upper-middle-class white professionals who populate so many of the plays that New York critics write encomiums to. But the crowd leaves Perry's show on a communal high. All Noel Coward gave me was a Champagne hangover.