Becoming Something:
Canada Lee

A new play by Mona Z. Smith
Directed by Traci Burwitz Mariano

Press contact: JoAnne Meyers
917-586-7757 / press@canadalee.com
www.canadalee.com
Produced by Mona Z. Smith & JoAnne Meyers

NEW YORK, NY - Becoming Something: Canada Lee, a new play based on events in the life of Canada Lee by award-winning playwright Mona Z. Smith, opens at the Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street, off Second Avenue) in New York City on May 9 - the 50th anniversary of Lee's death. Directed by Traci Burwitz Mariano, the play runs Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 1:30pm, through May 26. Tickets are $15 and are available on the web at wwww.SmartTix.com or by calling the SmartTix Phone Center 212-206-1515. More information is available at www.canadalee.com.

Once a household name, Canada Lee is now a forgotten footnote in the history of the McCarthy era. Born in Manhattan in 1907, Lee was a violin prodigy, jockey and prizefighter before he literally stumbled into acting.

Discovered by Orson Welles during auditions for the WPA Negro Theatre Project, Lee first appeared in the famed “voodoo” Macbeth. He shot to stardom in Welles' Broadway production of Native Son, later appearing in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) and Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) with a young Sidney Poitier. He also appeared in several Broadway production including South Pacific (1943), The Tempest (1945), Anna Lucasta (1944), and Dutchess of Malfi (1946), in which Lee became the first black actor to perform in whiteface. Broadway's first black producer, Lee presented On Whitman Avenue in 1946.

Lee's downfall came when Judith Coplon, a Justice Department employee who lived in Brooklyn, was caught red-handed passing secret FBI files to her Russian boyfriend, a KGB agent. During her espionage trial, it was discovered that one of the secret FBI files found when she was arrested reported that Canada Lee was a Communist.

The story made headlines in Washington, D.C. Long-time friend, Ed Sullivan, picked up the story and denounced Canada in his nationally syndicated column. Lee's career was destroyed. Lee left the United States and made one last film, Cry, the Beloved Country with Sidney Poitier, filmed in South Africa. Convinced to return to the U.S. for a promotional tour in 1952, Lee's passport was confiscated. Within weeks, he lapsed into a coma and died.

Playwright Mona Z. Smith is a former investigative reporter with the Miami Herald. An award-winning playwright, previous works have been performed in New York and California. Her credits include the John Golden Award for Playwriting in 1992 and 1994 and Leta Stetter Hollingsworth fellowships in 1992 and 1993. Her play Borderlands, a dark comedy about two women struggling to survive in Bosnia, won the 1996 national Berilla Kerr Prize for Playwriting; a new version was a recent winner of the Playwright’s Center of San Francisco national competition. Becoming Something was workshopped last year at the Strasberg Creative Center in Los Angeles.

Smith first became interested in the subject seven years ago, when she found Lee's name in books on music, theater and McCarthyism. Lee was described as the most respected black actor of his time; he was also described as a passionate civil rights activist whose death was one of a handful attributed to the blacklist. As a theatre professional and former journalist, she was perplexed by her lack of knowledge about someone who had done significant work on the stage, screen and radio.

Years of following footnotes led her to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, where she discovered seven boxes of data on the actor. She was put in contact with his widow, Frances, now in her 80s and living in Atlanta. Legally blind, Frances showed Smith the special equipment she uses to computerize hundreds of Lee's documents, including his letters, diaries and speeches. Frances, who has been working tirelessly for the last five decades to clear Lee's name, opened her home, her files and her memories to Smith.

Smith is writing a social biography of Canada Lee, to be published next year by Faber and Faber.

This production of Becoming Something marks director Traci Burwitz Mariano's third collaboration with Mona Smith. Previously, Mariano directed the premiere production of Smith's Borderlands at Soho Rep, and a production of Smith's Fire in a Dark House for Columbia University. She has directed many new plays including productions of Christopher Kyle's Boca, Berlin, This Blessed Knot and the American Living Room Festival premieres of LaStigmata and Rachel. She has also directed Kyle's adaptations of Hamlet and The Changeling, as well as his translation of Bertolt Brecht's Baal.

Becoming Something stars Anitra Brooks (Juanita Lee), Paschal Frisina III (Actor 1/2/3), Johnny Kitt (Canada Lee)*, Beth Lein (Frances Lee), Sheila Lewandowski (Actor 1/2/3), Michael Craig Patterson (Lovey Canegata), Patrick Riviere (Actor 1/2/3)*, and Christopher Wisner (Ed Sullivan)*.

* An Equity Approved Showcase / These actors appear courtesy of Actors' Equity Association

Canada Lee is one of the many actors Sidney Poitier was referring to when he accepted an Honorary Award “in memory of all the African-American actors and actresses who went before me in the difficult years” at this year's Academy Awards. On the 50th anniversary of his death, this play tells this forgotten New Yorker's story.

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