By Ben Joravsky
Johnson has been in Chicago for only about a year, so he’s written no plays set here–though he’s working on one. Most of the plays, including Hambone, are set in and around his hometown of Anderson, a midsize industrial city in the northwest corner of South Carolina. They also take up an old theme–conflict between fathers and sons–and make music a major focus. “My parents always said I had an old soul,” he says. “I was a rapper who loved hip-hop–that’s my generation’s music, and I don’t try to hide it. But I also loved the blues and R & B–Bill Withers, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown. Especially James Brown.”
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“It was big news when James Brown got arrested–it certainly had a big impact on me,” says Johnson. “In general, this was a transition time for our community. We were dealing with issues of identity and labels–were we African-Americans or Afro-Amer-icans? Rap was emerging, which was one generation’s assertion of its own identity. For James Brown to go to prison was huge. He’s strong and defiant. The things that rappers are doing, James Brown did first.”
After graduating, Johnson went to South Carolina State University, where he majored in acting. He won roles in summer-stock productions and antiviolence plays geared to teenagers. He says his decision to write came almost out of nowhere one lonely night during the summer of 1996. He was in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was acting in a play. “We had evenings free, and I was staying in this apartment. I had a small black-and-white televison and some video games, but after a while it got boring. I started having these images coming back to my head. At first I tried to ignore them. But they kept coming back. After a while, I had to write them down. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t think I had the intellect or the patience to write characters and scenes. I didn’t like writing. But the images forced me to do something with it. I wrote my first script in that hotel room with a pencil.”
He moved to Chicago last January. “Derrick was already here living in an apartment on Howard Street,” he says. “I sacked out at his place, sleeping on an air mattress on the floor.”
“But me and the Godfather gonna wake everybody up! Me and him gonna wake up the whole nation!”
“This play’s rich for actors–you can get right into it,” says Fleming, a 22-year-old actor who was born in Chicago. “Javon’s a major talent. He’s like smoking at the gas station–he’s about to blow up.”
