![[Company Logo Image]](../images/logo.gif){kind=logo}
Innovative works of live performance for multicultural audiences.
Shaping Ideas into theatrical events.
|
Innovative works of live performance for multicultural audiences. Shaping Ideas into theatrical events.
|
|
|
American Theatre Magazine October 2005
Eyes of the BeholderWhat do Critics see when they look at racially charged theatre?
By Carlyle Brown
As I sit before a stack of national reviews of this year’s Humana Festival of New American Plays and peruse some of the comments about my entry in the festival, Pure Confidence, I am reminded of the critical reaction to two productions from some years ago – one a play by Tennessee Williams, and the other a play of my own, The African Company Presents Richard III.
In its 1989-90 season, Arena Stage of Washington, D.C., presented The Glass Menagerie with an all-black cast, starring Ruby Dee as Amanda Wingfield and directed by Tazwell Thompson. Before that production, I had always thought of the character Amanda as a selfish, hectoring old witch who was out to ruin any possible chance of her children’s happiness. After seeing Thompson’s production, I understood for the first time what a beautiful and tragic play Williams has written. Amanda is a mother bearing all the burdens of her past and struggling with her fears for the future, doing the best she can with what little she’s got. And it is clear to me as air that it was Ruby Dee and the “black cast” that finally brought me into the world of the play.
A New York Times critic thought the production was improbable because, she said, no Black woman of that era would have attended cotillions and balls or would have received gentlemen callers. Like myself, the critic was clearly seeing race – yet she and I came to the production with our own subjective perspectives across the color line; we were looking at the same thing but seeing something quite different. And, in fact, what the critic saw was simple not accurate. W.E.B. DuBois has written about the long history of the “talented tenth,” the black elite of Atlanta; Madam C.J. Walker was not just the first black millionaire in America, she was the first woman millionaire of any color in America; Daddy Grace and Father Divine fed and clothed thousands of the black poor from their churches in New York and Detroit during the Great Depression, and they lived in mansions, and their daughters went to cotillions and balls and received gentlemen callers. This world was no doubt invisible to the critic as she watched the play, while my knowledge of it gave the production immediate and particular meaning. Where I saw a class structure in Black America she saw none.
The African Company Presents Richard III also appeared at Arena in the company’s 1992-92 season. David Richards of the New York Times wrote a good and fairly positive review, and, after outlining the play’s deficiencies, praised the work’s theatricality, without which, he said, the play would otherwise “simply have been a tale of racial injustice.” I marvel at this sentence to this day. No person who has ever experienced racial injustice could ever conceive of, much less codify in print, such a sentence. I have no idea what Mr. Richards was seeing or not seeing when he was watching my play, but one thing that reading his review made clear to me was that at least half of what you see when you go to the theatre is what you bring with you. And yet this is what makes the theatre fascinating and interactive and democratic. Everyone has a part to play, from the audience investing their imagination, to the actors interpreting their roles, to the prop person making the right choice of props. Everyone has a responsibility for some part of the theatrical event. And this goes doubly for the critic.
Pure Confidence is about a particular, idiosyncratic and essentially friendly relationship between a black slave, Simon Cato, a racing jockey, and his owner, Colonel Wiley Johnson, in pre and post-Civil War America. After a performance of the play at the 29th annual Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, an audience member came up to me and questioned the veracity of the play: Was the context of the play exploited – namely that of the slave society of the South – presented truthfully? As slavery is such a dense and complex subject, I asked her what she knew about it. Her response was that she was from Louisiana. And so I asked again, “What do you know about slavery?” Her response was to ask me whether or not I intended for her to be disturbed. I responded that I didn’t know her and had no idea if she should be disturbed or not. But she insisted, “Should I be disturbed?” I had no answer to give her except to say that it was not part of my original intention in writing this play simply to entertain her – that I had bigger fish to fry. This seemed to somehow satisfy her, and she smiled and walked away. This conversation was very gratifying to me because the play had achieved in this audience member what it had set out to do – to take what the average person thinks he or she knows about slavery and beat it with a hammer right before their eyes, in an attempt to incite a clash between the myth and the interpreted truth.
Several critics responding to Pure Confidence failed to see the metaphor in the play’s central relationship and focused on what they believed to be its basic historical inaccuracies. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called the play “historical nonsense…Even with its racially charged themes, it is a strangely benign work.” Charles Isherwood of the New York Times said the play “almost seems to spread a coat of sugar over an abomination.” Charles McNulty of the Village Voice felt the work “panders to the sentimental sensibilities of the audience…Brown skirts the harshness of his real subject.” And David Hurst on BroadwayStars.com, wrote, “It’s almost impossible to believe that any black slave would speak to their white masters with the bold arrogance Cato exhibits, and Brown seems to go out of his way to play up both the “step-n-fetch it” aspect of his delivery, along with an appropriately contrite sensibility on the part of the Colonel and his wife.”
There is, in fact, an abundance of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, in plays and cinema, that points to the peculiar liaisons between masters and slaves in the American South. The sources are too numerous to list. When Thomas Jefferson was fathering his mulatto children with Sally Hemings, surely he must have touched her and talked to her. This is because, like the master, a slave is a human being, and human beings, even under the most horrid of circumstances, somehow manage to have relationships with each other. Statements to the contrary seem to me to be absolute in the extreme.
As to the lack of vividness in this play of the cruelties of slavery, it is my opinion that once you have submitted to the complete ownership of the life of another human being, even down to the possession of the fruits of a woman’s womb on into perpetuity, then whippings, rape and murder are obvious and foregone conclusions. These slaves, my forebears, with their suffering and struggles, sacrifices and victories, compromises and capitulations, are the reason I exist. This is my legacy, of which I am proud, and should anyone presume that I would make use of that legacy to pander to anyone, I should like them to know that they are deeply mistaken.
At the end of the day, a play is a fiction, not unlike history, which has been referred to as the fiction of victor. Even Shakespeare’s Richard III could not stand up to the known facts of history, but few really care, because it’s not about history per se, but a resonant story of an evil man in a particular time and a particular place. If writers are to be judged by the veracity of the context of our plays, held to a standard by which the world of the play must be measured against the whole wide world itself, then we should least expect as much rigor from critics as they would expect from us.
|
|
Send mail to
info@carlylebrownandcompany.org with questions
or comments about this web site.
|
