Frankly, Madea, Tyler Perry's appeal is universal

By Phil Kloer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

When Tyler Perry shows someone the scar on his left wrist from a suicide attempt, he tugs down the watchband of his Rolex. When that doesn't expose the entire thin, white, vertical scar, he takes the Rolex off .

It's not the only striking juxtaposition in Perry's life.

Consider this: On most nights, he dresses onstage as a woman to deliver a passionate, strongly Christian message of traditional values. He lives in a 16,000-square-foot mansion in rural Fairburn, south of Atlanta, with a swimming pool, tennis court, prayer garden, gym, etc., but is rarely home. And when he is, he lives alone.

Tyler Perry, 36, is one of the wealthiest, most influential and best-loved people in Atlanta. But he remains relatively unknown among whites, only because he hasn't fully crossed over — yet.

"I don't believe that I fit in at all with what's happening in the mainstream," he says. "The risks I take, the way I mix genres, how I talk about God, that's pretty much the opposite of what they do" in Hollywood.

For about eight years, he's been the star of touring black gospel musicals — part of what used to be called the "chitlin circuit." But Perry also sells out venues like the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and the Kodak Theatre (home of the Oscars) in Hollywood. Last February, his first movie, "Diary of a Mad Black Woman," opened at No. 1, grossing $20 million its first weekend to the shock of the film industry. His second movie, "Madea's Family Reunion," opens Friday , and the shock will be if it's not No. 1. April brings his first book, "Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings: Madea's Uninhibited Commentaries on Love and Life."

The movies and plays combine comedy, melodrama, gospel music, romance, slapstick and plenty of old-fashioned, universal values like staying faithful to your spouse and respecting your elders. When the largely black audiences start answering back to the testifying onstage, it feels more like a black church service than a play. The formula — even he calls it that — has grossed well over $100 million in the past few years.

"A Tyler Perry play is a play where a gospel person can enjoy it just like a street person," says Pat Light, a Decatur fan who's been to several.

House that Madea built

The Tyler Perry empire is largely due to the popularity of Madea, the outspoken, gun-toting, booty-whupping matriarch he invented — and portrays — as a combination of his own mother, Maxine, and his aunt Mayola. "My mother is the wisdom of Madea, but my aunt Mayola, that's her wig, that's her voice, that's her gun in the purse. Madea is the PG-rated version of Mayola."

Madea is so convinced of her own righteousness she has no trouble hauling out a belt and whipping a foster child, firing a pistol to get attention, or even taking a chainsaw to a sofa to prove a point.

"Madea used to be on every corner in every neighborhood when I was growing up, and generations before," he writes in the introduction of his upcoming book. "Back around the 1970s, the Madeas in our neighborhood began to disappear and they have left an unmistakeable void."

Pronounced , Muh-DEE-ah, the name is an old Southern contraction for "mother dear."

"Sometimes what he says may sound to some people like cliches," says actor Blair Underwood, who stars in the new movie. "But he says things, and in ways, that especially in the black community, we understand exactly what he's saying, because we've heard those things since childhood."

Adds fan Pat Light: "Madea brings back a lot of things that your grandma taught you. So don't take your grandma for granted, cause you may be saying those things some day."

Large stage presence

Perry speaks softly for a big man. He's about 6 foot 5, and he works out for an hour a day, including weights, so his biceps and chest are huge. When he puts on Madea's wig and dress and joins his co-actors onstage in one of his live shows, he's so dominant — in size, in sheer presence — it's as if Michael Jordan has joined a middle school basketball game.

Atlanta has been his home for 14 years, the last four in a mansion he built on 12 acres, several miles south of Six Flags Over Georgia.

"The only way I could keep my sanity in Hollywood is to live here. It's light years away from the mentality of Hollywood" he says of Atlanta. His home is surrounded by high stone walls, iron gates and has a security system. But when he used it in "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" to save money, fans figured out his address.

"I got people driving by all the time, taking pictures," says the very private Perry. "A week ago I woke up and there was a note from some fan on the door. Someone had gotten past the gate and up to the door. It freaked me out."

So he's selling it soon, he says, and building a new one in Buckhead. He'll keep that one even more private.

He pads quietly through the house in moccasin slippers, new jeans and an old-school T-shirt that shows Redd Foxx from his "Sanford & Son" days, saying "Dis is da Big One!"

Time to take stock

Later this year, he may get to spend more time at home. Come May, he's going to stop the live touring shows, which have been running nonstop for eight years. This summer he'll shoot his third movie in Atlanta — an original screenplay titled "Daddy's Little Girl," without Madea, and without the formula — and then sit back and take stock.

"When you get to a level of success, you deal with a lot of things you weren't expecting. You have to deal with a lot of naysayers and negativity. It's almost like walking through a garden of thorns. You have to check and see how bad your wounds are before you go on any further. I just need to see where I am."

Where he is now and where he comes from could not be more different. Perry grew up in New Orleans, in the ghetto, the son of preschool teacher mother Maxine and construction worker father Emmitt.

"Friday and Saturday nights were Hell night, and Sunday was redemption," he says, of his difficult relationship with his father.

"My entire faith was born then, and my whole prayer life was based on if I just believed, things would be OK."

Things weren't. Hence the wrist-cutting as a teenager. "It was more frustration than anything, not wanting to be in that situation any more," he says of the attempt.

He was vaguely creative, with no real outlet. "In those times that were crazy, I would go inside my mind and create these imaginary worlds where I could be happy somewhere else."

Out of school and working as a bill collector, Perry visited Atlanta in 1992, when he was 23. "It was the promised land. I saw black people for the first time doing well. They had houses and cars and they spoke well and dressed well. I went back to New Orleans and loaded my Hyundai and moved to Atlanta."

And proceeded to fail utterly for the next six years.

The 'chitlin circuit'

Perry held a number of jobs here, mostly bill collector and used car salesman. But inspired by Oprah Winfrey, he wrote a gospel musical, "I Know I Have Been Changed," hired a theater and produced it, thinking it would be a hit. He expected 1,200 people on opening weekend. Attendance was about 30.

He changed jobs, changed apartments, lived with friends, lived in his car for a while, re-wrote and re-cast the play. It failed again and again. Finally, in 1998 he got the right cast, who spread the word among its churches, and word got out. "I Know I Have Been Changed" became a hit, and moved, briefly, to the Fox. Perry wrote, produced and starred in six more plays before the 2005 movie.

Gospel musicals, which caught on in the '70s, are still a phenomenon, mainly in the African-American church community. Often with low budgets and production values, they've been disparaged as the "chitlin circuit." The phrase goes back to segregation when there were separate venues for stars like Ray Charles; back in the day, it wasn't always derogatory.

"People who say that, they have no understanding of who we are as a people and where we've come from," says Perry.

In character as Madea, on a feature on his line of DVDs, Perry says, "It's black folks want to see theater. I don't see no chitlins. "

When they do see it, the energy can be amazing.

"I laughed so hard I had to go home and take Excedrin," Winfrey said on her TV show after seeing "Madea Goes to Jail," the latest live show.

She's a friend and big supporter, as is poet and author Maya Angelou, who has a cameo in "Family Reunion." (Perry does a loving but wicked deadpan impersonation of Angelou.)

It's the "Oprah" appearances that have boosted Perry's crossover appeal and familiarity among whites. Last year at the Fox run of "Madea Goes to Jail," the audience was almost all black. Now, in some cities, says Reuben Cannon, producer of the "Madea" movies, some audiences are 20 percent and 30 percent white.

He recently test-screened "Family Reunion" for an all-white audience in suburban Sacramento, Calif.

Cannon said that they knew that blacks would support the film , "But with the white audience, we did a Q and A afterward and they simply talked about the values. The word 'race' wasn't used."

"I believe if you stay true to what you do," says Perry, "eventually everybody will see these are universal stories."