Thurgood

Laurence Fishburne might have bombed on C.S.I., but he's at the top of his game in George Stevens Jr.'s play about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. In this performance filmed at Washington's Kennedy Center by Stevens's son Michael, Fishburne is literally the whole show, framed as a one-man journey of recollection spoken before an audience of Howard University students. Ambling with a cane onto a stage that's bare except for a long conference table and occasional back projections, the aged jurist greets his listeners directly before launching into a chronological survey of his life. The actor dispenses with the cane as he recounts stories of Marshall's boyhood and unlikely academic career and then adopts a swagger as he continues with the young lawyer's entrance into the embryonic—and often dangerous—Civil Rights movement. Stevens's script is filled with wry observations and rousing anecdotes about key individuals Marshall worked with (such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) and accounts of the landmark legal cases in which Marshall played a prominent role (most notably Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, which ended segregation in public schools), culminating in his appointment to the federal bench and then being named the first African-American Supreme Court Justice by Lyndon Johnson. Fishburne captures Marshall's gregarious personality beautifully, even as he departs from the script momentarily to welcome a couple of latecomers trying to squeeze unnoticed into their front row seats. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)