[ Remembering the activism and artistry of a New York theatre
hero.]
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THE MANY LIVES OF VINIE BURROWS  
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Helen Shaw
January 5, 2024
The New Yorker
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_ Remembering the activism and artistry of a New York theatre hero. _


, Alix Jeffry, c Houghton Library, Harvard University

 

When the actor and activist Vinie Burrows died, on December 25, 2023,
surrounded by her family, she was ninety-nine. She had lived at least
five lives. In the course of nearly a century, she had spent time as
“one of the reigning divas of the Black theatre,” as the New
York _Post_ called her in 1996, but she had also been a
representative at the United Nations for the Women’s International
Democratic Federation, a self-made pioneer of touring solo shows (she
counted at least six thousand performances), an antiwar protester with
the Granny Peace Brigade, and, in her eighties and nineties, a newly
flourishing muse of downtown theatre, which awarded her an Obie for
Lifetime Achievement in 2020.

Tiny (under five feet tall) and radiant, Burrows looked like a
sparkler and sounded like a thunderstorm; she had a voice, rich and
super-resonant, shaped for declamation. Her friend the playwright and
performer Daniel Alexander Jones told me that she was “a living
embodiment of the Black oratorical tradition,” connecting her
thrilling, kettledrum timbre to that of Paul Robeson’s and Martin
Luther King, Jr.,’s. “When she would speak in a rehearsal room, if
you put your hand on any wood, it would be vibrating,” Jones said.

Known to many as Ms. Vinie, Burrows was born in Harlem Hospital in
1924. Her own accounts of her birth year changed over the decades.
After she was arrested, in 2005, for obstructing the Armed Forces’
Times Square Recruiting Station with the Granny Peace Brigade, her own
lawyer tried to get her to reveal her age on the stand. She took
the Fifth
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Burrows got her start performing in radio. (Her mother, Phyllis, was
in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which ran a
children’s drama class, which led to a Sunday radio program.) She
trained early on at the American Negro Theatre
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first Broadway role in 1950, appearing as Dolly May in “The Wisteria
Trees,” a Chekhovian drama starring Helen Hayes. In an interview
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Theatre_ magazine, Burrows spoke about observing Hayes every night
from the wings. “One evening after the show, she left the stage and
said, ‘Damn if I wasn’t good!’ ” Burrows, though, felt that
Hayes had been off that night. “I said to myself: The performer
never actually knows what he or she has done,” Burrows said.

On Broadway in the fifties and early sixties, she appeared in six
plays in quick succession, acting in parts opposite Ossie Davis,
Dennis Hopper, and Eartha Kitt. When she was cast in the now legendary
Off Broadway production “The Blacks,” by Jean Genet, from 1961,
alongside soon-to-be superstars such as James Earl Jones, Louis
Gossett, Jr., and Cicely Tyson, she, too, seemed bound for
conventional fame.

But Burrows never did quite become a household name. Frustrated by the
parts being offered to her—too often a mammie or “lady of the
evening,” according to program notes from the New Federal
Theatre—she first thought about quitting the profession, and then
decided to make her own path. Fusing her activist work with her
artistic practice, she created eight one-woman shows: poetic
anthologies, such as “Walk Together Children,” from 1968, and
biographical portraits, like “Rose McClendon: Harlem’s Gift to
Broadway,” in 1999. (She won an _audelco_ Award for the latter.)
In these years, she travelled all over the world, often as an emissary
with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, a consultative
organization, reporting to the United Nations. She was sent to a
congress of Greek widows demanding pensions; she heard from women in
Russia who wanted to be surgeons; she went to apartheid South Africa,
and spoke before the U.N.’s Special Political Committee on what she
saw there.

By the time I came to New York, in 2002, though, her epic era seemed
to be behind her. When she was in the news, it was most often for her
antiwar, pro-First Amendment protests with the Grannies or with New
York activists Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. I saw her
in “Hecuba” at the Pearl, in 2006, as one of the
chorus—TheaterMania called her “redoubtable,” which she
certainly was—but New York theatre is forgetful. The “reigning
diva” of one era can be almost obscure by the next.

Then came the Foundry Theatre’s exquisite 2013 revival
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Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan,” directed by Lear
deBessonet. Burrows played a god, one of a capricious little trio of
grandes dames, with Mia Katigbak and Annie Golden. (Katigbak
laughingly recalled Burrows sitting quietly in the dressing room:
“All of a sudden something would come out of her mouth, like, ‘Oh,
that’s like when I had lunch with Brecht.’ ”) The night I saw
“Good Person,” at La Mama, the trio was clustered together on a
high balcony, wearing choir robes. Suddenly, Vinie’s robe caught
fire after brushing against a light. An actor pointed up, saying, in a
shocked, steady voice, “Fire. Fire
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I remember everyone went still. Then, after a terrible, long moment,
the drummer in the onstage band, Eric Farber, leaped over his drum
kit, scaled the balcony, and stamped out the flames. The show, and
Vinie, went on.

“Good Person” was a hit, and, afterward, Burrows, then in her
nineties, become a downtown icon all over again: she was a sprite-like
ancestor in “The Homecoming Queen”; an ancestor-like sprite in
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for the Public’s Shakespeare in
the Park; and one of the seventeenth-century Ranters, pledging herself
to a just world, in Caryl Churchill’s “Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire,” directed by Rachel Chavkin. (Her collaboration
with Chavkin also included a complex, multiyear workshop of a
production called “Reconstruction,” which will now go on without
her.) The older Burrows became, the more directors chose her for her
youthful quality. Coincidentally, my sister, Jane Shaw, directed the
last stage production Vinie Burrows ever did: an adaptation of a
Tolstoy short story, part of a duet of Russian plays at the Mint
Theatre, in 2020. After the show one night, I overheard Burrows on the
phone. She was practicing one of her songs, and worrying about whether
the first notes were audible. As she had backstage in 1950, she was
still trying to work out the distance between what the performer had
been feeling onstage and what had actually been communicated to the
audience.

To many of us, Ms. Vinie was our last connection to a time swiftly
passing out of mind. In the Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s
“Witnessing History” video series
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wanting to go to the Victory in Europe celebration in Times Square, in
1945. “I went to Forty-second Street and I got off the subway and I
saw this immense crowd,” Burrows said. She turned around and fled.
“All those white people together were menacing. In their joy, they
would be menacing to me,” she said. The list of her touchstones
includes figures from a vanished epoch—Thornton Wilder, Lillian
Gish—and even the New York that raised her seems impossibly far
away.

Theatre passes quickly, but thankfully Burrows’s wise, passionate,
mischievous voice has been preserved. You can hear her talk about her
work with the U.N. on the Performing Arts Legacy Project
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meditate on “The Blacks” in the Foundry’s filmed Legacies
Series
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from 2002, or see her accept “fabulous sainthood
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award-slash-beatification from Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping
Choir, in 2022. At her elevation ceremony that September, at the
secular Earth Church in Manhattan, she read an adapted Margaret Walker
poem, “For My People,” that she had used more than fifty years
earlier, in “Walk Together Children.”

Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men—and
women—now rise and take control!

It was only sixteen months ago, but, on the video, in which she sits
next to her close friend, the Broadway actor Amber Gray, her thrumming
voice still summons you to attention.

Gray, who thinks that Burrows’s truest legacy is in her work for
justice, has been part of the “Reconstruction” project with
Burrows and Chavkin for the past six years. “I’ve been keeping a
document of all the random one-liners that Vinie said that made the
whole room stop for a minute and get weepy,” she says. On the phone,
Gray found a quote of Vinie’s that she particularly wanted to read
to me: “I guess my love of language started with the Bible. Yeah,
once you get rid of all the beginning and beginnings, the story is so
compelling. And then you live it in your own life. Ha ha. Oh, you
realize—there’s nothing new.” ♦

_HELEN SHAW joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2022.
Previously, she was the theatre critic at New York magazine and also
its culture vertical, Vulture. She has also written about theatre and
performance for 4Columns and Time Out New York and contributed to
the New York Sun, American Theatre magazine, the Times Book
Review, the Village Voice, Art in America, and Artforum. She was
co-awarded the 2017-18 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic
Criticism._

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* theater
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* Vinie Burrows
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* American Negro Theater
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* peace
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* Shakespeare in the Park
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* social justice
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