Tyler Perry’s Big Happy Family

I went to Madison Square Garden to see Tyler Perry’s new musical, Madea’s Big Happy Family, a day after I sat through a Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s 1939 play Present Laughter. I noticed a few differences. In Coward’s play, the main character, a famous stage actor, spends most of the evening in a dressing gown delivering bons mots to an entourage of fellow theater people. In Perry’s show, a sharp-tongued grandmother delivers sassy put-downs and motivational lectures to a brood of squabbling family members. Coward’s plot reaches a climax as the actor finds out that several pestering women have all booked passage on the same boat he’s taking to Africa. Perry’s culminates with the cast enlisting the audience in a sing-along of Earth, Wind and Fire hits. At the Broadway theater, I didn’t see a single black face. At Madison Square Garden, I was just about the only white one.

Tyler Perry has for years operated in something of an alternate theater universe. Though best known for his hit movies (starting with Diary of a Mad Black Woman in 2005), top-rated TV series (TBS’s House of Payne) and friendship with Oprah Winfrey (with whom he produced the Oscar-nominated film Precious), Perry, 40, may well be the most popular unsung playwright in America. Raised in a poor and abusive home in New Orleans, he staged his first musical play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, in a former Atlanta church in 1998. Two years later he introduced his most famous character, the wisecracking, God-fearing granny Mabel (Madea) Simmons — played by Perry in a plus-size print dress and silver wig. Since then he’s turned out a steady stream of plays (on which his films are based) that tour the country, playing to African-American audiences on a modern-day version of the “chitlin’ circuit,” the segregation-era venues for black theater and vaudeville.

His stage work gets little mainstream attention. Indeed, critics were not invited to see or review Madea’s Big Happy Family. I bought my own ticket and sat near the back of the nearly full Madison Square Garden theater, one of the early stops on a tour that will stretch into May. (Next week: Jacksonville, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.) It was a bracing reminder that popular theater is still thriving in America — well under the radar and way off Broadway.

Madea’s Big Happy Family, like most of Perry’s work, is an odd hybrid of populist comedy-drama, rock concert, revival meeting and motivational seminar. The broad comedy, stereotyped characters and simple set (a two-story family house, living room downstairs, bedroom upstairs) give the show a TV-sitcom feel — an impression reinforced by the video screens that project the action simultaneously, even edited with two-shots and closeups.

The plot revolves around Shirley, a single mother with grown children, who learns at the outset that her cancer has spread and she has four to six weeks to live. Accepting the news with barely a flinch, she tries to tell her extended family, only to find they are too caught up in their own troubles to pay much attention. Among the brood: a son whose bitchy fiancée wants him to get into the dope trade so she’ll have enough money to open a boutique and an older daughter who reveals that her younger “brother” is actually her own illegitimate child.

All this is seasoned with raucous gag lines, rafter-raising gospel and R&B songs, an inspirational Christian message (Shirley, on her deathbed and surrounded by the family, sings to her last breath — then reappears as a white-robed angel ascending to Heaven to finish the song) and the alternately jokey and hectoring presence of Madea. She is the irresistible center of gravity, dispensing both specific advice (“You’ve been tricked!” she tells the guy with the pushy fiancée. “Tricked by drug dealers! Get a job!”) and all-purpose bromides (“If you think good things, good things got to come back to you”).

But Perry’s out to have fun too. He regularly steps out of character to ad-lib — chastising latecomers in the audience (“The show starts at 8. You move a little slower, you need to leave a little earlier”), joking about a co-star’s bad breath and delivering impromptu movie reviews. (He praises Disney’s The Princess and the Frog for having a black heroine but laments that she doesn’t wind up with a black prince: “Black woman can’t even have a black man in animation!”) After the curtain call, he spends another 15 minutes talking to the crowd, explaining the background of the show (he wrote it after the death of his mother last year), making a pitch for Haiti relief and urging fans to see his next movie, for which he shows a trailer.

It’s crude, commercial — and effective. Perry has tapped into his audience’s shared experiences, hopes and worries, the need for a little escape, a little realism and a few moral lessons. I’m not part of his target audience — just as, I imagine, most of Perry’s fans can’t relate much to the glib, angst-ridden, upper-middle-class white professionals who populate so many of the plays that New York critics write encomiums to. But the crowd leaves Perry’s show on a communal high. All Noel Coward gave me was a Champagne hangover.