Did Malcolm X, Redd Foxx really wash dishes together? Playwright fills us in

Jonathan Norton’s latest play has one of those long, provocative titles that lays out its premise in startlingly direct fashion: Malcolm X and Redd Foxx Washing Dishes at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in Harlem. Could it be true, or did Norton make the whole thing up?

Indeed, the future Civil Rights leader, 18 at the time, and the would-be actor-comedian, 20, became “fast friends” in 1943, according to the prolific Dallas playwright. During that year, they worked together in the back of Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a now-defunct hangout for New York jazz musicians of the day.

After runs in three other cities, the two-hander is ending its rolling world premiere back in Norton’s hometown at Dallas Theater Center with the same actors and director just as he’s ending his tenure as DTC’s interim artistic director.

Norton got the idea from Malcolm X’s autobiography. Initially he wanted to write about the relationship between the former Malcolm Little and poet Maya Angelou, but he decided she had documented her life so extensively there was no room left for his imagination. Then he stumbled on the book’s single paragraph about “Chicago Red,” nickname of the man born John Elroy Sanford, the future sitcom star Redd Foxx.

“We became good buddies in a speakeasy where later on I was a waiter; Chicago Red was the funniest dishwasher on this earth. Now he’s making his living being funny as a nationally known stage and nightclub comedian.  I don’t see any reason why old Chicago Red would mind me telling that he is Redd Foxx.”

At the time, Little was known as “Detroit Red.” They both had reddish hair. The prospect of figuring out what might have gone on between them excited Norton.

“What made it so appealing as a playwright was there was more space to imagine,” he says in a Zoom interview. “There was this huge open door. At the same time, one of things I was trying to hold onto was finding that balance between the imagination and fact. I would oftentimes try to take whatever historical facts I knew and think of them on a larger human scale. How might this play out in my own personal life or anyone else’s if we were dealing with the same issues.”

The main issue both men were dealing with was being Black in a racist society. In 1943, there were violent clashes between whites and Black Americans in cities like Detroit and Beaumont, which Norton says the play touches on.

“Riots were breaking out across the country, so it was a very intense summer. You’re also looking at these two young men navigating the intensity of what it means to be a Black person, specifically a Black man in America, and acknowledging what you see constantly in the media or in your daily life — that you’re not safe, you’re not wanted — and imagining these two future icons experiencing that in ways that would shape the men who they would become.

“It’s a way of juggling fact with fiction, imagination with history. It’s also the thing that made the writing process fun and compelling,” Norton says. “The thing that kept me in it was having that challenge. I was really excited by the opportunity to examine what I like to call one of many crossroads in their lives, imagining the ways in which they might have influenced each other.”

Among the facts that Norton riffs on are Redd Foxx’s frequent homelessness during which he would sometimes sleep on rooftops, and Malcolm X’s relationship to his hair. Norton was also motivated by the fact that Malcolm X’s father was a minister. How might these facts have affected their worldview, their view of themselves, their relationship and their future paths?

“Malcolm X, if you listen to his speeches, he wasn’t like a haha-funny person necessarily, but there was a great deal of humor and sarcasm and certainly a charismatic quality which could be similar to that of a standup comedian,” Norton says. “They both had that ability to hold a room.

“And then if you look at the interviews that Reed Foxx gave, particularly in the mid-to-late ’60s, he was very much concerned about politics, about the state of Black America. He’s so serious and sober, the complete opposite of everything you would see in his standup. He addressed a lot of those things through humor.”

Norton found other similarities, including that both men were estranged from their families, “two young men who were in the world alone, what that might have meant to them, how it shaped their relationship and the opportunities those aspects of their history might provide in terms of storytelling.”

Both were hustlers, engaging in petty crime like selling marijuana. “There was this hustle that Redd Foxx had where he would steal clothing from dry cleaners and sell it,” Norton says. “Malcolm was starting to fall off into bigger things, numbers running, gambling, selling hard drugs, he himself becoming addicted. He talks in the autobiography about being a pimp.”

In the end, they were on different paths, Malcolm X’s running through prison, where he discovered the Nation of Islam. “Redd Foxx was like, ‘Look, I’m trying to be an entertainer, and I have this future ahead of me, and I have plans for my life, and this whole world of the road that you’re going down, I can’t go down that road.’ ”

A biography of Foxx spends a chapter on the time he spent with Malcolm X, Norton says. Foxx also spoke about the relationship in an interview.

“That interview was fascinating because he never really goes into their early history together. The way he talks about him is as Malcolm X and not Detroit Red, the friend he knew. There is a weird distance in it,” Norton says.

They met again later after both became household names, before Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Norton hints that he deals with the reunion in the play, the Civil Rights leader approaching the comic actor about getting involved with the Nation of Islam. Details of the real meeting are scant.

The world of the Chicken Shack, also clouded by the passage of time and few records, interested the playwright as well.

“Sadly, there was very little detail that could be found about Jimmy’s,” he says. “The most that I was able to find were random blog posts that followed Harlem history or music history that would always circle back to this particular moment in time and all of the famous people who came through the Chicken Shack.”

Norton, director Dexter J. Singleton and the two actors were able to visit the site — now an Ethiopian restaurant — as the play was having a reading in New York. They had dinner and met the owner.

“She shared a lot with us about the history of the place,” Norton recalls. “It was really cool to be on the same block and in the building. That was really useful.”

The physical space where Malcolm X and Redd Foxx worked together provided a metaphor, particularly the two doors in the kitchen, one leading outside to the menacing world, the other to the dining room where patrons ate and drank happily, symbolizing the possibility of something better.

“When that little door to the restaurant opens, you hear the music that’s being played,” Norton says. “It ties them to the Chicken Shack, but at the same time they’re removed from the glamour and excitement of what’s happening on the other side.

“Later in the play, there’s a moment when one of the characters has an opportunity and gets to make a decision about actually going through that door that leads to the glamour and the excitement and the possibility of not washing dishes. There’s this choice and decision that they have to make, which has an impact on their relationship.”

May 8-June 7 at Wyly Studio Theatre, 2400 Flora St. $25-$88. dallastheatercenter.org.