Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 13, 1994 TAG: 9405140002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By HELEN DUDAR THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In take after take on this damp summer day, orange juice has been sipped, scrambled eggs nibbled, burned toast rejected, children's squabbles parentally squelched. While camera positions were changed, actors and crew spilled out onto Arlington Place, and everybody relaxed into chatter.
Everybody, that is, except Delroy Lindo. He was across the street, alone, leaning against a car. The expression on his face was so intense that it would have been errant cruelty to interrupt his meditation.
Lindo nearly always stands apart during breaks; it is his way of holding his concentration. He will tell anyone who asks; he is consumed by most of his roles.
Eight months after that bickering breakfast sequence, the results of Lindo's most recent obsession will shortly be on public display. "Crooklyn," a bittersweet comedy about one family's summer in Brooklyn in the early 1970s, opens Friday.
Lindo's role is an unexpectedly gentle-hearted addition to the steady and rich range of his work in theater and films. His first time out with Spike Lee was as West Indian Archie, the Harlem numbers boss of "Malcolm X." It was a smallish role in which he appeared first as a silky, subtly sinister figure and later, in spectacular contrast, as a broke and broken-down old man.
In "By Any Means Necessary," the book on the making of the film, Lee noted that Lindo's performance "really rocked the set from roof to floor."
So here he is in the strikingly different persona of Woody Carmichael, doting parent of one small daughter and four sons, unemployed jazz pianist with the period's requisite shaven head and single gold ear stud.
After "Malcolm," Spike Lee never thought of casting anyone else; what Lindo brings to any film, he said, is rare versatility. "Some actors don't have the reach, don't have the stretch. It's no problem with Delroy."
Anyone familiar with the Lee family history will find recognizable details in "Crooklyn": the five children, the Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone, the jazz musician father, the schoolteacher mother. It is, however, more fictional than autobiographical, they say, a work "inspired by" memories.
Spike Lee's siblings, Joie Susannah and Cinque, both actors, wrote the script; he polished it, contributed the title (affectionate local slang for their home borough) and found a small role for himself as the neighborhood glue sniffer. Joie Susannah also makes a brief appearance as an aunt who buys Troy (Zelda Harris) a dress for a funeral.
For only the second time in his film career, Lindo has a leading role, sharing top billing with Alfre Woodard, who plays his wife. When the subject of star status comes up, he deals with it the way he often confronts subjects he is skittish about: In his amiably guarded fashion, he says it's "interesting." After some prompting, he concedes that the billing could be described as a kick.
As usual, Lindo was relentless in his pursuit of the details for a role. For West Indian Archie, he hunted up old-time Harlem numbers runners to mine their memories. A knowledge of the mechanics of the system, he said, helped him ease into the character. For "Crooklyn" he spent months on piano lessons to look comfortable at the keyboard.
Most of this information was offered in a borrowed Manhattan apartment during a day away from the camera. Lindo had come to town from his home in Englewood, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Neshormeh, educational programs manager at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Tall and lean, he looked like a two-tone ad for a health club, muscular brown arms in dramatic contrast to pristine white tank top and white slacks.
Away from the set, Lindo is in perpetual motion. He restlessly reduced a bunch of red grapes to bare branches, toyed with a wooden ball from a centerpiece, found a peach in a bowl of fruit and reduced it to a pit. At one point, he said, "You don't mind if I kind of pace?"
For years, Lindo honed his craft and kept landlords at bay with steady work in a variety of roles, largely in regional theater but occasionally in New York. Then in 1988, he was suddenly a force to be reckoned with. That season he reached Broadway in August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" as Herald Loomis, a gaunt, haunted man who had emerged from illegal bondage and, child in hand, was searching for a vanished wife - and redemption.
The director, Lloyd Richards, had directed Lindo once before, as Walter Lee in a revival of Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun." Richards remembers warning him that "he had much further to go" from playing a young man like Walter Lee striving for middle-class comfort. The director was rewarded with "a wonderful actor," magically transforming a lost soul into Wilson's "shining man."
"I loved him for the unstinting, unfettered investment of self" in the character, said Richards. "You don't have to build a fire under Delroy. The fire is going all the time."
Few who saw that production are likely to have forgotten the first-act climax: Herald Loomis in the grip of an apocalyptic seizure. The performance brought lavish reviews and a Tony nomination. Lindo expected it to "catapult" his career or at least to attract rewarding roles.
The next offer was an invitation to audition for a revival of Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending" starring Vanessa Redgrave. When Lindo read the play, he discovered that the part amounted to a walk-on. "I was speechless. I couldn't believe they were serious.
"If I could have one thing in my relationship to this work, I'd pray to have a healthy perspective," he continued. "You know, if you get into the woe-is-me bag, it's not very usable. What can you do with it?"
In time, the Wilson play helped his professional life. Spike Lee remembered his work when he was casting "Malcolm X." Even earlier, film makers who had heard about the performance began to come up with small roles. His biggest, most demanding film role is yet to be seen.
In "Behanzin" he stars as the exiled head of the former African kingdom of Dahomey. Although filming finished last fall in Martinique, Lindo has no word about the release date.
Before rehearsals for "Crooklyn" began, Lindo was at the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, playing his first Othello. The months since "Crooklyn" have been slow - a film job collapsed for lack of financing - but his days did not pass unused.
He polished his Othello in Actors Studio workshops, spent time with a project that initiates Hell's Kitchen youngsters into theater work and went to South Africa as part of a delegation of African-American players, among them Danny Glover and Angela Bassett.
Lindo reports these events in a voice with the mellow tint of honey. His speech reveals no trace of his Jamaican parents, who immigrated to England, or of his first 15 years in London. He was born there, probably about 40 years ago. His age remains a secret, presumably out of concern for typecasting.
His early years are also secret, or at least too "interesting" to talk about. Eventually, he wound up in Toronto with his mother and began to find acting jobs. In the late '70s, he received a partial scholarship to the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Denzel Washington, who played Malcolm in "Malcolm X," was a fellow student.
For all the struggles, the disappointments and the rejections, Lindo has never imagined another working life, not since he was cast as one of the three kings, at age 5 or 6, in a school Nativity play. In robe, crown and earrings, he marched down the aisle, singing "We Three Kings of Orient Are." People praised him for remembering his lines and for the clarity of his speech. He hated the earrings. He loved the attention.
by CNB