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written and directed by Andrew Moodie

Factory Theatre, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

February 2-26, 2006

Andrew Moodie’s latest play tells the biography of the inventor Elijah McCoy (c.1843-1929), whose name became a byword for quality in the phrase “the real McCoy.”  The play both explains why we have never heard of McCoy and reclaims a fascinating man’s life from undeserved obscurity.

McCoy, born in Canada to runaway American slaves, showed so much promise in school he won a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at Edinburgh University.  McCoy moved to the US, where no one could believe a black man could be an engineer and so set him to stoking boilers.  Nevertheless, McCoy devised a solution to one of the greatest problems facing steam locomotion sold worldwide with the marketers’ proviso that McCoy’s race not be revealed.

Moodie tries with much success to bring unity to the episodic nature of biographical drama through recurring stage symbols and an emphasis on the theme of entropy.  As the older McCoy, Maurice Dean Wint gives us a vivid portrait of an intellectual whose scientific prowess confounds white views of blacks but separates him from the uneducated black majority of his time.  Kevin Hanchard plays both the younger McCoy and later McCoy’s best friend with great feeling.  The rest of the cast zestfully plays a myriad of roles in a work that deserves the widest possible audience.          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2006-02-09.

Photo: Marcia Johnson and Maurice Dean Wint. ©Ed Gass-Donnelly.