PicoBlog

(Above: Jon Micheal Hill in a publicity photo by Patrick Eccelsine for the CBS television series Elementary in which he costarred for seven seasons as Detective Marcus Bell.)

Last summer around this time Jon Michael Hill was starring as Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Mountaintop by Katori Hall at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles A year later he is now co-starring as Conrad Hensley in writer and producer David E. Kelly’s 6-episode Netflix series adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel A Man in Full. Very different characters - not only because one is an historical figure, one of the most heroic of Americans, and the other a fictional creation conjured originally by a white man known for wearing white suits, a southerner who could cut quite a literary figure by putting some swan in his swagger - but also because one was a Baptist pastor who used his Christian mission to lead a nonviolent Civil Rights movement and the other was used by the man who originally created him to be a conduit to make some authorial points about Stoicism. Racism and jail time were deeply parts of each of their narratives but so was the way with which they chose to confront them. There is a performative higher calling to each. For King, it was to embody social justice. For the actor who portrayed King - and later Tom Wolfe’s Conrad Hensley - it is to embody his art.

I recently finished watching the Netflix series which jettisons characters and narrative threads from Wolfe’s novel, conflates others, invents a few of its own. It’s sort of like the book at times but finally nothing like the book. It could be quite maddening if one loved the book, as I did, and yet not mad enough to meet the book’s demands - although the tragicomedic ending of the series sure comes close but finally just made me roll my eyes. Jeff Daniels as the lead character, Charlie Croker, is a combination of Donald Trump and “Big Daddy” Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Daniels was a great Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway and I’d love to see him return there, in fact, as Big Daddy in another revival of Cat. The series, if nothing else, made me long for that. Hill, in fact, would make a great Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But as great as Daniels and Hill are in A Man in Full, they seem to be in two aesthetically different shows. Kelly - maybe it’s Netflix’s fault for not ordering twice as many episodes - never could seem to find the right tone - hell, the temerity - to bring in all the different strands of the vastness of Wolfe’s narrative which was the result of years of reportage packed into fanciful riffs and social satire and southern politics and race relations and the staccato march of detailed descriptions of stuff and possessions on parade and all done with a felicitous facility for language that couldn’t be lassoed so was just used as a lasso itself - a long, long, long one full of flourish and knotted plots - to capture the rollicking rot of fin de siècle America.

I read Wolfe’s novel lying on the beach in Miami a few weeks after I had been diagnosed as being HIV positive after experiencing several days and nights filled with the terrible textbook symptoms of conversion. Reading the book took my mind off my diagnosis and yet more deeply focused me on it in a mindful way because of the studied Stoicism that was part of the Conrad Hensley narrative thread. Even now more than 20 years later, I am still alive and still - hell, with temerity - finding ways to be mindful as I live life as a pilgrimage. I am reminded of this bit of dialogue from Charlie who had at this point been schooled in Stoicism by Conrad. “I’m older than mosta you and I can tell you that the only real possession you’ll ever have is your character, that and your ‘scheme of life,’ you might say,” he says. “The Manager has given every person a spark from His own divinity, and no one can take that away from you, not even the Manager himself, and from that spark comes your character. Everything else is temporary and worthless in the long run, including your body. What is the human body? It’s a clever piece a crockery containing a quart a blood. And it’s not even yours! One day you’re gonna have to give it back! And where are your possessions then? They’re gonna be picked over by one bunch a buzzards or another. What man’s ever been remembered as great because of the possessions he devoted his life to ’cumulating? I can’t think of any. So why don’t we pay more attention to the one precious thing we possess, the spark the Manager has placed in our souls?”

Hill is a soulful actor. That is on full display in A Man in Full. He is the stoic heart of the series. His career has included seven seasons on the CBS police procedural Elementary and being nominated for a Tony for his first appearance on Broadway in Superior Donuts in 2010, the same year he began another television role as Detective Damon Washington in Detroit 1-8-7. Back in August 2021, he and his fellow cast members in Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s play Pass Over, Namir Smallwood and Gabriel Ebert, were the first actors to return to work on a Broadway stage after COVID shut it down for over a year.  To say they reignited the theatre district in New York is not an overstatement.  Directed by Danya Taymor, the production won a rave from The New York Times critic Jesse Green, who wrote: “Having survived pandemic jitters (so far) and its own circuitous path to get there, it emerged like a star: in top shape, at full throttle and refreshed by some artful doctoring. If it seems strange to talk about a tragedy in such terms, keep in mind that though Pass Over is forthrightly centered on the plight of two young Black men in an urban police state, its ambition is so far-reaching that it embraces (and Danya Taymor’s thriller of a production, succeeds as) comedy, melodrama and even vaudeville. In that, it emulates the vision and variety of its most direct sources: Waiting for Godot, the Samuel Beckett play about tramps biding their time in eternity, and the Book of Exodus, about an enslaved people seeking the Promised Land.” 

I saw the production in an earlier iteration at the small upstairs Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center Theater after the show had already been seen at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company where Hill and Smallwood had earlier appeared in True West, a play that sometimes sent its own echoes through that Broadway production as the two actors ricocheted off one another in thrilling and disturbing ways. An earlier version of Pass Over was even filmed by Spike Lee and can be seen on Amazon Prime.   

I talked to Hill back in 2021 when he had just opened in the Nwandu play. It was for a magazine story. Some of our conversation was timeless. Stoic. Here it is.

QUESTION ONE

You have appeared as Puck in two productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — one in Central Park as part of The Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park and the other at the Houston Grand Opera in composer Benjamin Britten’s version of the play. Why do you think directors have twice cast you in that role?

It’s so funny. I am not mischievous in my life. I am not in other people’s business and Puck is really meddling. I think it is mostly the imagination and agility.  I just sort of have a creative imagination and I try to be physically agile and those things lend themselves to Shakespeare. I think that is where the similarity ends with Puck and me.

QUESTION TWO

Did you have nickname in high school?

I was called “Hollywood.” I was on the football team but I was also doing school plays and my teammates sort of tapped me as one of those guys they might see on TV one day.  I wasn’t one of the cool kids but I sort of knew everybody.  Everybody knew who I was because I was involved in so many different things. Football. The track team. Speech team. Drama. Band.

 QUESTION THREE

Well, they were right. When you got cast in CBS’s Elementary, you were basically a kid but after seven seasons you and the character ended up a mature man. Did you, in fact, mature along with your character? 

I hope so. I hope I learned what I require of myself to deliver during an artistic process. Very early on, I had a late night.  It was pretty much the only time I was late showing up. It was in Season One, maybe Episode Five. I was late to the set and they had to sort of move things around and everybody was kind of worried about how I was doing. And my acting wasn’t good in that scene. I was a little hungover. And I was like: this can’t happen. And it didn’t happen again. I think I matured in that way.   

But like on the football team, my coaches wanted me to step into a vocal leadership role because I was more a lead-by-example type guy. I think the years on Elementary, I didn’t get bored because I sort of poured myself into every aspect of that production shadowing the producers and directors so that I would be ready to direct if they finally gave me the opportunity. And I felt more at home in that role when I did get the opportunity to direct than I thought I would. I don’t seek out leadership roles, but when it came along I felt at home in it. And I’m hoping to do it more in the future — directing, producing, making the storytelling happen, setting a tone.   

QUESTION FOUR

You are also often cast in what could be considered macho roles and yet you find the tenderness in them, a gentleness that doesn’t stoop to being just considered gentlemanly. That is too gendered for its deepness. Your work in Pass Over was imbued with that. [And so is his work in A Man in Full.] Are you aware of embodying both the female presence and the male one in your work?

In Pass Over, Antoinette and director Danya Taymor talked to us a lot about the female body and where that lived in those guys and where they gave themselves permission to embody that. Antoinette talks a lot about the presence of God in the play. The way she described it to us in rehearsal is that there are two things working. There was Father Time. Those guys were in this endless loop and that was sort of the masculine energy. And then there was Mother Earth that came along during the play that my character Moses sort of summoned. And that feminine energy is what brought that rebirth at the end and the promised land that sprouted up. They wanted us to continue to explore that. We danced around. We played games. We did all kinds of stuff in rehearsal to make sure the feminine lived in that play.   

You have said that art makes you see something differently.  

It depends on what you’re bringing to it when you’re going to see something and whether you’re open to seeing something differently.  But some plays are able to knock down a wall for you that you didn’t know was there.  That happened to me when I saw one of Tarell McCraney’s plays, Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet, when he was still at Yale.  I was up there doing one of the Steppenwolf shows that Anna Shapiro directed but I was sitting in on classes, too, and I got to see that play. That was the first time I saw everyday Black people onstage and it wasn’t didactic. It was complex and complicated and funny and devastatingly heartbreaking. I got to see Black people represented in their full selves for the first time. And that made me think about what theatre could really be. And what it could do. I think theatre has that power and can do that for people.   

As for Pass Over, a lot of people don’t like that the cop is forgiven and finds redemption in the Broadway version. That’s a real sticking point for some people. Some people are able to find their way to it and say that there has to be a path and a way forward for us as a people and a country.  And some people are like: No, man, he didn’t get enough of a comeuppance. Antoinette had to talk to me about forgivingness and how you don’t have to deserve it to receive it. Some people don’t think the cop deserves it, but he receives grace.   

QUESTION FIVE

Who are some of your heroes?  

Harry Belafonte. Viola Davis. I love what she is doing with her production company. As for acting, I think of Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeffrey Wright. I hope to do work like them. I think they are chameleons. I wish I had the swag of Denzel. I love the Coen Brothers and their films. Spike Lee. A writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates. Then there’s Medgar Evers. And John Lewis – God rest his soul. If I could have met John Lewis, that would have done it for me.  

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