So why the perfect attendance accolade? Can't we give him a screenwriting award or a directing trophy? In fact, we can't. Because unlike actually producing well-made movies or composing believable dialogue or, hell, treating his audience like they have half a brain, Perry pretty much just showed up for black women over 35 when nobody else did. Perfect attendance.
Perry is at least a hero, if not a kind of filmmaking messiah. He's being worshipped as the Great Black Hope for an ignored, underserved black audience rabid for wholesome, uplifting films and plays that aren't about booty calls, gang wars or rappers. So far, two movies, Madea's Family Reunion and Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and eight plays have allowed Perry to build a thriving cult following. Thing is, the work just isn't all that awesome. Critics (this one included) see very little redeeming artistic value in the work, but audiences can't get enough. Just because Waterworld is the only movie ever made about a dude with webbed feet who sails a flooded planet doesn't mean fans of movies about dudes with webbed feet sailing flooded planets have to like it.
To say that the audience at last Saturday night's performance of Madea was overwhelmingly black would be an understatement. The only non-black people (that includes Asian, Mexican, Eskimo, whatever) I saw on the way in were the box office attendants, and on the way out, I counted five white heads. The venue seats 3,420. It's not that non-blacks wouldn't find Madea entertaining, but unless you spend Sunday morning at a black church somewhere in the South, you just plain don't know the play exists.
With no massive marketing campaigns shoving the Perry formula down the collective white American throat during Grey's Anatomy commercial breaks, the Caucasian population has remained oblivious. Instead, Perry's plays have been passed along on bootleg DVDs from one black family or congregation to another during the past eight years, generating a buzz unheard even by industry execs who should, in theory, be paying attention to that kind of thing. But Madea's Family Reunion just spent two weeks at the top of the box office and, last year, Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened at number one. As Madea might say, it's high time white people "lurrrrrnnnt."
Last weekend, Perry's portrayal of the title character, a viciously honest grandmotherly figure with weighty, free-flying breasts and a pistol in her purse, was nothing short of brilliant onstage. Sure, it's funnier because it's a handsome 6-foot-5-inch guy in a dress, but it works. Perry's script for Madea Goes to Jail is a kind of soap opera cum Sunday morning service cum Marx Brothers running gag that has serious trouble deciding whether it wants the audience to be laughing, crying or turning over their eternal soul to the Lord God Almighty. When it's funny, it's funny. When it's not, the play is downright painful.
At the end of the first act, two incarcerated women speak to each other across the cellblock, reciting pandering, unabashedly obvious dialogue about religious conversion.
"You mean Jesus loves even me? Just the way I am?" asks the token godless woman. The response? "Jesus loves you. Just the way you are." Cue the oppressively maudlin music and wavering, melismatic vocals. Later on, a teenage foster child actually asks the prison chaplain, "Will you teach me how to pray?" The chaplain embarks on a step-by-step musical explanation that is so openly preachy it borders on being comical. It's the kind of thing you can only imagine do-gooder neighbor Ned Flanders from The Simpsons thinking is great dialogue.
Regardless, audiences seem to enjoy the sad-bastard parts just as much as the high-energy hilarity. Perry has no regard for the fourth wall, passing out Kleenex to gum-chewing audience members and hollering in Madea's Georgia drawl to latecomers entering the theater. If the mood strikes, Perry departs freely from his script in minutes-long monologues full of advice and admonitions for the audience that shift the performance from play to preaching.
"I feel like I'm talkin' to somebody in hurr!" Madea shouted last Saturday, mid-scene, with several other actors onstage waiting to deliver their lines. Never breaking character, Perry launched into a--somehow--truly funny tirade about abusive relationships. "If yo' man hit you five time Wednesday and three time Thursday," he yells, "that's not exactly an improvement in the relationship."
These are the moments when Perry shines, and it's also why Madea live is so much better than Madea on the big screen. Madea is an unpredictable woman. She carries a pistol in her handbag, for heaven's sake. The uncertainty of what Perry might reveal about his character before a live audience is thrilling. Onscreen, it's less obvious that Perry towers a full foot above his female co-stars, and the suspension of reality that prepares us psychologically to see a movie also makes us kind of accept Madea as a woman, not a man in drag.
At curtain call, Perry strutted onstage in metro-ghetto-prepster fab, wearing an oversized striped polo and baseball cap, while the other cast members remained in costume. In his way, though, Perry was portraying another character: thankful Tyler, humbling himself before his gracious audience. He spoke to those precious middle-aged and older black women. He told them how much he appreciated their support. They yelled and whistled in return, thrilled to be acknowledged by the Tyler Perry. But it just didn't sit right with me.
In Madea's Family Reunion, one of the main characters is berated by her mother for dating a bus driver. Years before, the mother says, she'd made the mistake of settling for a drifter musician who ended up wronging her. Madea herself, in a moment of comic genius, encourages another character not to settle for an abusive husband and instead to throw a pot of boiling grits on the abuser. Stick it out alone, Perry drills into the minds of his female audience. Better will come along. If you ask me, the women deserve better than Madea.