Cabdriver's Tragicomic Show Tells of Forgiveness
by Loretta Green
Sunday, February 13, 2000

he year is 1984, and Carl Ray grips the steering wheel and stares straight ahead as he talks about his love of driving cabs:

''Driving taxi in Hollywood -- if you like people -- you meet every kind of person God put on Earth. And you meet a few in Hollywood that God didn't put no place else on the planet.''

Ray, of San Jose, says those words in a play he has written about his life called ''A Killing in Choctaw.'' In the taxi, he picks up a strange spiritual philosopher who will help free him from a terrible burden.

It is the burden of rage that he carries for the man who killed his father, George, in 1962 in Choctaw County, Ala. Ray, a black youngster headed for Tuskegee University in a few days, had not said ''sir'' to this white man.

During Ray's one-man performances at Lockheed Martin, Sun Microsystems, and at Georgia Tech in Atlanta last Wednesday, he alternately held the audience in the grip of the tragedy and in the sweet release of shoulder-shaking laughter.

He brings to the performance his considerable talent as a stand-up comedian and his ability to relive his life on stage.

Falling to his knees over the lifeless body of his father savaged with eight shots from a .45, his cries of ''No!'' shiver the audience's spine. Real tears stream down his face.

He describes his mother's instant protective action.

''Mama was calm. It was like she and Daddy had rehearsed this scene a thousand times,'' he says of the dangerous racial clime. ''She said, 'Don't you do nothin'. Your daddy want you to go to college.' ''

But Ray's play does not drain the viewer with endless, raw emotion. Just as artistically, the thespian mask of tragedy flips to comedy as the stage darkens and the spotlight comes up on Ray in a nightclub routine.

Ray started his comedy routine as a child to lessen the attacks from schoolmates who tormented him because of the polio he got at age 4. He was called ''that flick-ed boy'' (afflicted). He had no feeling on his left side, but he turned that misfortune into commerce.

''Eddie Rogers offered me a nickel to punch me and I thought, 'Heyyy! I'm getting paid!' When I started getting feeling, I was disappointed, because I had to shut down my business,'' he laughs on stage in an odd mix of humor and brutal truth.

Ray shows no sign of polio today. He graduated in engineering from Tuskegee with the help of nurturing and counseling from staffers who saw him staggering under the weight of a murderous tyrant and the guilt of a dead father.

Ray worked for Lockheed, then left for Hollywood to try stand-up. He drove a cab for income and because he liked people.

In the play and in real life, when he picks up that philosopher -- one Wil Hinkson -- the seed is sowed for forgiveness. It falls on hostile ground. Ironically, some time later he picks up Hinkson again and it sprouts.

Slides flash on the bare stage, revealing the real characters and the recorded voice of Hinkson who also wrote the music and collaborated on taxi scenes.

Ray is no Sidney Poitier or James Earl Jones, but he is a talented performer who does an admirable job of telling a tale of an American tragedy and -- remarkably -- of forgiveness.