The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove

Madame CJ Walker, the pioneering African-American millionaire who made a tidy bundle in women’s hair-care products, shares a problem with your garden-variety titular character from a Shakespearean history play. Her epic and remarkable life—she started out a dirt-poor washwoman but by the 1920s achieved Oprah-like status—is certainly the compelling stuff of great drama. Yet its breadth, width and uneven turns defy containment to a neatly structured play. (Like one of Shakespeare’s Henrys, she probably needs at least two plays to do her story justice.)

Taylor’s play, unlike tackier celebrity-bio works, dutifully hits more than just the tent-pole moments of Walker’s entrepreneurial ascent and pockmarked personal life (neither her husband nor daughter proved loyal to her). But while her engaging rendering of Walker’s life is admirably restrained in its hero worship (her flaws aren’t hidden) and artful in illustration (there’s taut and juicy dilemma throughout), Dreams is still two plays—one about a businesswoman and one about a failed matriarch—barely held together.

The glue that binds them is daunting Caldwell, who plays Walker as a stately but rough-hewn brick house. And sly supporting work from Nikki Walker as her daughter (whose dewy performance in Act I gives no hints of the disaster she devolves into in Act II) goes a long way toward selling an overlong script that’s most likely still dieting down.—Christopher Piatt