Brian Copeland on Not a Genuine Black Man at Theatre Off Jackson This Weekend

Actor and writer Brian Copeland

“In talk radio, letters that come to you through snail-mail, they’re only from two groups: old ladies, who have the return address labels that are pre-printed, and handwritten letters from nuts. And this was type-written with a typewriter, and that’s what grabbed my attention. Because the first thing I did was laugh. I mean, where the hell did you find ribbon?” Brian Copeland told me over the phone last week with a chuckle, as he was leaving a UPS Store near his Bay Area home, on a quick errand sending books to his daughter who’d just gone back to college.

“Here’s the letter verbatim,” he continued, “as it was written, unsigned: ‘As an African-American, I’m disgusted every time I hear your voice because you are not a genuine black man.’”

That letter, and the phrase it provided—not a genuine black man—have long since become famous across the nation, having reached Copeland at just the right moment. A long-time comedian, writer, and Sunday morning radio talk-show host in the Bay Area, Copeland was looking for a way to create a longer work, and that insult proved to be just what he needed. His solo show that took that phrase as its name debuted in 2004 and became the longest-running one-man show in San Francisco history, with runs in New York and Los Angeles to boot. His 2006 memoir, Not a Genuine Black Man: My Life As an Outsider, became a bestseller and has been adopted at high schools, colleges, and city-reads programs around the country. And this weekend only, Seattle has the chance to see Copeland, who is bringing Not a Genuine Black Man to Theatre off Jackson for four performances, produced by Backwards Ensemble Theatre Co. (Feb. 11-14, tickets $25 sliding scale/$15).

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And all because of an anonymous insult. It’s true that in a lot of ways, Copeland doesn’t conform to the African-American norm. He’s Catholic (just 3 percent of US Catholics are black), his comic heroes include decidedly white humorists like Carl Reiner, and much like the president, his diction makes him too “white” for some blacks. “Barack Obama went through this,” Copeland pointed out. “The first debate, on YouTube, first questions was, ‘Are you black enough?’ First question. And his answer was, ‘Well, I can’t get a cab.’”

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“I’ve found that there are race police in every single culture. Asians who’s friends think they’re too Euro-centric refer to them as ‘bananas.’ Or  ‘Twinkies.’ Yellow on the outside, white on the inside,” Copeland said. “Latinos they’ll call ‘coconuts.’ I did an author event with Mike Wallace from 60 Minutes, and he said that the grief he gets is every time he will report, in an unbiased fashion, on the Middle East. And if there’s something where the facts prove that Israel needs to be taken to the woodshed for something, he won’t censor that, he’ll report it in an unbiased fashion. Well, he said every time he does that, he gets thousands of letters from Jewish people saying, ‘You’re not a real Jew, because no real Jew would ever criticize Israel under any circumstances.’”

But despite Copeland’s semi-assimilated adulthood, his experience growing up was anything but: in 1972, at the age of eight, Copeland moved from Alabama—where his mother was fleeing an abusive relationship—to San Leandro, California, which was known as the most racist community in the country.

Located just a dozen miles from UC Berkley, the hotbed of Sixties liberal radicalism, San Leandro was, according to the 1960 census, 99.99 percent white, an exclusionary white-flight destination into which Copeland was cast as a child. His first few days there featured being chased by roving gangs of white kids and being arrested at the park for carrying a weapon (his baseball bat, which the officer just assumed was not meant to be applied to the ball he was likewise carrying).

Not a Genuine Black Man uses humor to lead the audience along before “socking them,” to use Copeland’s term. Right before he started on the script, he watched the first two seasons of Norman Lear’s light-years-ahead-of-its-time sitcom All in the Family for inspiration, to get a sense of flow and how to use disarming humor to maximize the wallop of the very heavy topics he has to address. “One of the coolest things that’s happened to me is that when I did the show in Los Angeles, Norman Lear came out,” Copeland recalled. “And he said, ‘I really like what you do a lot,’ and I said, ‘God, thank you! Thanks so much, because you realize I’m doing you?!’ And he goes, ‘Well, you got me down!’”

In the show, Copeland plays some 30 characters from his own life, and jumps back and forth through time, between his childhood as an outsider because he wasn’t white, to his adulthood as outsider who isn’t black enough, and explores the depression and, ultimately, the suicide attempt to which that life pushed him. “There are many, many themes to the show,” Copeland stresses, “and it’s not a play about being black. It’s a show about being different, and what it’s like to be the only one.”

That accounts for show’s (and book’s) stunning appeal. Copeland himself seems humbled by how his story of being a racial outsider has managed to cut across so many racial and cultural barriers to resonate with the unlikeliest people. One of the strangest connections Copeland experienced was in New York, where he noticed a surprising trend meeting audience members after the show.

“People will shake my hand and tell me, ‘We were the first Latino family in the suburbs of Kansas City at that same time,’ or, ‘In my neighborhood, I remember when a black family moved in and everyone sold their houses,’” Copeland explained. “But the stories I kept getting in New York were these older folks who’d shake my hand, with tears in their eyes, and say, ‘I enjoyed your show very much, and I was at Auschwitz.’ Or, ‘I was at Bergen-Belsen.’ And to my knowledge, these were the first survivors I met. And I say ‘to my knowledge’ because it’s not something people talk about. It’s like what dad did in the war—it’s too painful. But after two hours, I’m pretty naked up there onstage, and they felt they could open up to me.

“So one night I asked a man who identified himself as a survivor, ‘Why are there so many survivors who are attracted to this show?’ And he said that survivors walk around in a world full of people—they can be on Madison Avenue on noon-time on a Friday when there are literally a million people on the street—and they’ll feel like they’re all alone. Because you can’t get it, because you weren’t there. And they relate to this idea of the story of an eight-year-old little boy who’s isolated.”

Similarly, the show has resonated with people who suffer from depression, which was ultimately the hardest thing for Copeland, as an artist, to grapple with when creating the show, particularly when it came to revealing his suicide attempt by running his car in a closed garage. “I really debated about whether or not to put that in the show,” he said, “because of the stigma of depression and embarrassment of having gotten that low. But I figured, if I’m going to do this I’ve got to tell the story and tell the truth.”

“So I really battled with it, and then three weeks into the run, I got the book contract,” he continued. “And I was debating again whether I should put that in the book. Anyway, as I said, I was shaking hands with people after the show, and I had a long line of people who are telling me their personal stories. It was Saturday night, and at the end of the line was this attractive woman, dressed like a professional, like she’d just come from the office to the show. Someone who, you know, you look at and your snap judgment is, ‘Oh, this is a really together woman.’ And I expected to hear one of these stories of, ‘Oh, in my neighborhood this happened.’ And instead she says to me, ‘I think about killing myself every single day, but I never told anyone, because I figured if I did, they’d lock me up. But I guess if you can get up here every night, and tell this story to total strangers, on Monday I can go get some help.’”

Six years after the debut of a play that was supposed to run just six weeks, it’s stories and experiences like this that keep Copeland going with Not a Genuine Black Man. That, and the fact that it’s his connection to both his mother (who died when he was 14) and his grandmother (who finished raising him, and who died since the show opened). “I play 30 different characters and they’re the two stars of the show,” Copeland said. “I miss them very much, and one of the things that I get from doing this is I get to go out and spend a couple hours with them.”