In 2017, three of the five nominees for best supporting actress were African American. One was Viola Davis, for her role in August Wilson’s Fences, in which she played opposite Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, who also produced and directed the film. Davis took home the Oscar that night.

Davis had been nominated twice before: once for a brief supporting role in Doubt (2008) and once as lead actress in The Help (2011), in which she plays a domestic worker for a white family in 1960s Mississippi. The film was much loved by moviegoers—it received a nomination for Best Picture—and Davis’ work was critically acclaimed. But her character’s depiction in the film has been problematic for many academics interested the portrayal of African Americans on screen. One such thinker, Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communications and Media Studies, recently published an essay titled, “‘You Is Kind, You Is Smart, You Is Important,’ or, Why I Can’t Watch The Help.”

Monk-Payton said she used the “You is kind…” phrase because it is part of the dialect used by the 2009 book of the same name by author Kathyrn Stockett, who is white.

“I wanted to take back some of that language and insert my own thoughts on how this author took certain licenses with her subjects’ language to appeal to a white liberal imagination of what working-class black people would sound like,” said Monk-Payton.

The essay appears in a book of short essays published last month by Rutgers University Press, titled Unwatchable, where scholars take on certain media that they find unwatchable, from bloody horror films to real world violence to scenes that are just in bad taste. Monk-Payton’s essay speaks to her discomfort in watching a fine actress playing a maid. She noted that the content of the film is “ostensibly” about black domestic help in the 1960s, but it is told with a blind spot enabled by melodrama, she said.

“My essay is about thinking through what black women feel while watching a white savior narrative—what I call black women’s simultaneous endurance and exhaustion,” she said. “Another reason I chose this title because it reflects the racialized labor of care work, whereby Davis’s character has to routinely recite this mantra to affirm her white employer’s young daughter.”

That the Oscars often take place during Black History Month isn’t lost on Monk-Payton. She rattled off historic precedents of films that use “a certain kind of cheesiness in the service of creating the illusion of integration.” She noted that Imitation of Life, both the 1939 and the 1959 versions, also use the domestic worker and employer’s relationship as a device to examine racism. But she added that in 1959 version, which she called a “messy film,” director Douglas Sirk was at least “thinking about the role of melodrama” as a device that helps advance the story in a film, but that was 60 years ago. Her essay allows that “many melodrama films are compulsively watchable,” but those trafficking “in racial politics and white liberal guilt are cringe-worthy.”

“The fact that these kinds of films keep getting made is problematic,” she said. “They’re nostalgic looks at overcoming adversity through a liberal framework, a maternal melodrama, that thinks through these problems in a domestic realm, so it’s really alluring and very sentimental.”

She said contemporary films like The Help may not overtly present their characters as the stereotypical mammy figures, but the black maid trope is similar and affects how viewers misunderstand the hard labor performed by the character.

Ultimately, Octavia Spencer took home a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as a maid in The Help, which Monk-Payton said she can’t help but view as something of a throwback to Hattie McDaniel winning best supporting actress for also playing a maid in 1939’s Gone with the Wind.

She said that if there is a relatable scene in The Help for viewers like herself, then it’s that of an elderly maid (played by iconic and beloved black actress Cicely Tyson) being fired and sent away from the house where she works. In the scene, the maid, who has been with the family for years, turns then rests her hand on the screen door gazing at her former boss, who shuts the door in her face.

“She looks forlorn. I read that shot as this endurance and exhaustion being expressed through her averted gaze,” she said.

She said that talented actors, like Davis and Spencer, give in to the impulse to humanize these characters by taking the roles. She noted that Davis once said that she could bring something new to the well-worn character, but has since told The New York Times that she regrets taking the part because “it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard.”

Similar criticisms have been made about this year’s Oscar contenders, including Roma, which portrays an indigenous domestic worker living with a benevolent family in Mexico, and Green Book, which flips the script with a white chauffeur driving a wealthy black pianist.

More Voices in the Room

“The question is ‘Who is in the room when creating these movies?’” she said. “We need a more localized view, a multiplicity of voices in the room, more content that speaks to these experiences so that the films don’t have that translator aspect.”

Monk-Payton applauds another 2019 Oscar contender, Black Panther, for its importance in black cinema. While she doesn’t want to diminish “the enthusiasm and emotional attachment” for the blockbuster, she said it doesn’t quite match up to the subtlety of August Wilson’s Fences.

“Fences is refreshingly set in contrast to the spectacular quality of Black Panther; we need more of that kind of film,” she said. “We tend to forget about these quiet films that explore the quotidian, the ordinary.”

It’s a view shared by Davis, as she made abundantly clear on accepting her Oscar for Fences.

“Here’s to August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people,” she said.

Washington, a two-time Oscar winner, was nominated for best actor. Viola Davis, who plays Rose, was nominated for best supporting actress. And the late August Wilson, who adapted his 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning play for the screen, is nominated for best adapted screenplay.

If Washington wins his third Oscar on Feb. 26, he’ll join a select group of actors—so far, nine—who have won a best actor Tony and a best actor Oscar for playing the same role. He originally played Troy Maxson on Broadway in a 2010 revival of Fences. Producer Scott Rudin had approached him about creating a film version of the story, but Washington demurred, saying he wanted to bring the play to the stage first.

After Fences became an award-winning success on Broadway, taking home three Tonys, Rudin followed up with him again about bringing it to the screen, Washington said in an interview with Good Morning America producer and livestream host Will Ganss, FCRH ’14.

“I ran for another four years until he cornered me,” Washington joked, “or until I felt comfortable enough to give it a shot.”

Washington called Wilson a “brilliant, brilliant writer” in the interview with Ganss. “It’s a gift to be able to interpret his material, to bring it to film.” And he said he’s seen some strong emotional reactions to the story. “You just don’t know how it’s going to affect people or where it touches them.”

One of Washington’s co-stars in the film is Stephen McKinley Henderson, who taught at Fordham last fall as the University’s Denzel Washington Chair in Theatre—an endowed position Washington created with a gift to his alma mater. While Fences was written in 1987 and is set in the 1950s, its story is timeless, Henderson said last year in a Fordham News interview.

“It was clear [Wilson] saw the beauty in people, and he wanted to make sure the rest of the world saw what he saw,” Henderson said. “It’s a classic, and a classic is something that is never finished saying what it has to say.”

Together with Viola Davis, Henderson and Washington starred in the 2010 Broadway production, which won the Tony for best revival of a play, a best actor Tony for Washington, best actress for Davis, and a best supporting actor nomination for Henderson. Much of the Broadway cast has been retained for the move to the screen.

A theater professor emeritus from the State University of New York at Buffalo, Henderson knew August Wilson and has acted in his plays on and off Broadway. He sat down for an interview with Fordham News to discuss Wilson, acting, and teaching.

How did you first meet August Wilson?

I closed in a play at The Totem Pole Playhouse near Gettysburg. While driving through Pittsburgh I learned that he was speaking in a neighborhood called Homewood. I heard August speak there, and it was something so genuine and true. It was clear he saw the beauty in people, and he wanted to make sure the rest of the world saw what he saw. I felt that I was on a journey to meet this guy, and I got to work with him from 1996 until his death in 2005.

You’ve worked with director Lloyd Richards. What was his role in Wilson’s legacy?

If there were to be a Mount Rushmore of acting teachers and theater contributors, Richards would be on that mountain with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Stanislavski. He was the first African-American Broadway director, doing Raisin in the Sun in 1959. It took Lloyd Richards’ career in the theater to bring August to his highest level onstage, and it took Denzel’s journey and his brilliant career to introduce Wilson to this larger audience. Now more people can see the contribution Wilson made.

What was it like to transition Fences from the play to the film?

In the play I had the best seat in the house: It’s just Viola, Denzel, and me for much of the first scene. So to have that happen on film and to be with these incredible artists is just wonderful. With Denzel’s stature [in Hollywood]we were able to get three weeks of rehearsal before filming. For actors, film really is this intimate experience, whereas in a play the audience can see everything. In film you have to make choices as to who the focus should be on. But we were in great hands because Denzel is the director.

Is something lost in the translation to film?

When Laurence Olivier said he would do Shakespeare on film, there were purists who said the public wouldn’t go to the plays. It was the exact opposite. It enhanced their love and appreciation of Shakespeare. In Fences, we were all quite aware that actors have been doing these roles for a few decades and nobody will be able to satisfy everyone. But now more people will know what a contribution August Wilson made to American theater.

This play was set in the 1950s and written in the 1980s, is it still relevant?

It’s a classic, and a classic is something that is never finished saying what it has to say. It could be written in Sophocles’ time, or Shakespeare’s time, or in the 60s, but it still has something to say. I think August was one of those writers who wrote about human nature. He knew that a playwright, especially a poetic playwright, has a cultural gift. They come from a specific culture but they write about what it is to be human—and very specifically from their own cultural point of view. And August came to us from the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and his stories and his characters still speak to people everywhere.

The play uses the everyday language of African Americans, with liberal use of the N-word. Given current concerns about safe spaces and cultural appropriation, how do you teach texts to students from a variety of backgrounds?

It would just be impossible to work on an art form outside of the context of the social issues at the time. In terms of safe spaces, we have to make the classrooms the safe space. The students have got to be able to trust that we can say things here and we can grow. If you’re fortunate enough to get to play roles, you needn’t be limited to the ones that were written only for your culture. Especially while you are in a training program, while you are developing your craft. You can indeed have a wonderful career later doing your own culturally specific roles if you choose —and many British actors have said that they’re Shakespearean actors and they proudly do his work almost exclusively. It’s perfectly alright if an African-American actor says ‘I’m going to work only in my culture.’ But most artists have worked on characters that are simply human. African-American students must often end up playing a “white role” in order to be cast at all in some programs. There’s also a proud tradition: James Earl Jones has played Lear, Andre Braugher played Iago, and Diana Sands has played Saint Joan. It goes on and on. So, how can I turn to a white student and say you can’t play this or that role? Of course they can, and if they are going to play it with distinction someday professionally, they must be allowed to work on it while they are training.

Videos of McKinley Henderson by Miguel Gallardo.