Stepin Fetchit and Muhammad Ali...,

NYTimes | Loosely inspired by an actual friendship between the two men, the play explores how each dealt with the pressure of being a black public figure trying to shape his identity in the face of outside forces. Fetchit became Hollywood’s first black star, but only by embodying a demeaning stereotype of black men as lazy and shiftless. Despite Ali’s new fame as a boxing champ, his alliance with the Nation of Islam made him controversial. Mr. Power’s play suggests that while Fetchit became indelibly associated with racial prejudice, and Ali with black pride, their divergent stories may have had more to do with the eras in which they were born than the characters of the men themselves. 

The play takes place primarily in Lewiston, Me., in 1965, where Ali is preparing for a rematch with Sonny Liston, whom he had beaten the year before to take the heavyweight title. The atmosphere is fraught, since the recent assassination of Malcolm X has put a spotlight on Ali’s relations with the Nation of Islam. (That group, which Malcolm X had left, was rumored to be behind the killing.) The remote Lewiston was selected for the fight because no more prominent city would host it after rumors began that allies of Malcolm X would be gunning — literally — for Ali. 

In this tense atmosphere, Ali (Ray Fisher) turns to Fetchit (K. Todd Freeman) for informal advice. He knows that Fetchit was an intimate friend of the great black fighter Jack Johnson, and despite his preening egoism, Ali wouldn’t mind having an ace in the hole: knowledge of a legendary maneuver called the “anchor punch” that he believes might have been entrusted to Fetchit. 

Fetchit claims to know nothing of this secret weapon but is eager to rehabilitate his image by linking himself with a figure who embodies self-determination. (In the scene of their first meeting, Ali teasingly calls him “a traitor to their race.”) Having established the reason for their alliance, however, Mr. Power cannot make it a convincing focus of the narrative, so the play bobs and weaves among a host of subplots. 

Flashbacks to Hollywood in the 1920s depict Fetchit — his real name was Lincoln Perry — shrewdly negotiating his contract with the paternalistic studio chief William Fox (a feisty Richard Masur). A star of the vaudeville circuit with a huge following, Fetchit knows his value, and manages to secure highly favorable terms — albeit only by inventing a fictional white lawyer to blame for his demands.