Dodging raindrops like he does bullets, about 400 people listened to a Lethal Weapon tell a story Thursday night.
Danny Glover, stage and screen actor, gave a dramatic reading of an excerpt from “The Meteor and the Madhouse” by Leon Forrest at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall as part of the inaugural event of the Leon Forrest lecture series.
Jazz musician Henry Threadgill accompanied Glover on stage for the performance of “On Lucasta Jones,” a chapter of “The Meteor and the Madhouse,” which Forrest finished just before his death in 1997. The duo slowly crossed the stage without acknowledging the audience, and sat down 15 feet apart from each other.
Glover dominated most of the performance, with Threadgill intervening with light jazz sounds in between passages.
“The reading and jazz went together,” said Ross Grimes, a Medill freshman. “It was a nice preview of Leon Forrest’s last work. It made me more interested in his work, I plan to go back and look at some of his novels.”
Tiffany Berry, who was already familiar with Forrest’s work, agreed Glover and Threadgill handled his last work well.
“I enjoyed how they continued to go back and forth,” she said. “It was too short, though; I wish it had been a little longer.”
Forrest, an acclaimed novelist and essayist, served as the chairman of the African American Studies Department from 1985 to 1994. Forrest taught literature and creative writing at Northwestern prior to becoming chairman, and his work became so widely renowned that in 1985 his native Chicago declared April 14 “Leon Forrest Day.”
Forrest believed “the business of novelists and teachers is to inspire all of us not to ignore our history but embrace it,” said Weinberg Dean Eric Sundquist during his introduction of the performance. “Neither in his essays nor his fiction did Forrest evade the complicated texture of culture.”
The annual Leon Forrest lecture will work to expose his work to future generations, said Sandra L. Richards, chairwoman of the African American Studies Department.
“He had a wonderful way of connecting with people,” she said. “He was inspired by both Afro-American and European-American cultures.”
“(The lectures will) remind us of the great gifts of literature he left us,” Sundquist said.
Forrest penned other novels including, “There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden,” “The Bloodworth Orphans,” and the 1,135-page epic, “Divine Days,” which has been called the “War and Peace” of African-American literature.
