A good friend of mine, who is a woman of color, once told me that she never liked to read Jane Austen, and other writers of her generation held in esteem by the American education system, because none of the characters ever looked like her unless they were a servant or a slave.
I was stunned. Wrapped up in my own whiteness and the cocoon of privilege, it never occurred to me. This was nearly 20 years ago and I’ve never forgotten that conversation nor the myriad implications it has.
So many times, what white people consider to be “uneducated” is really disinterest. Nowhere is this more apparent - especially in Pittsburgh, known for what may or may not be a unique brand of racism - than in the theater.
Several years ago, The Pittsburgh Public Theater presented Thurgood, a one-man show about the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who fought tirelessly to dismantle Jim Crow and other segregation laws. The audience for the Sunday matinee I attended totaled maybe 200 people, nearly all white, in a theater that holds 600. My first thought was: why didn’t the theater reach out to black churches and organizations to offer discount or free tickets?
(Photo Credit: TRIBLive.com)
Maybe they did. I’ll never know. But the fact that an important piece of black history was performed on stage without an audience who could identify with Marshall on so many more levels than I could seemed tragic to me.
Theater has the power to present different perspectives. To educate and to connect us through the emotional undercurrent of the experiences it shows. To collaboratively remind us of our humanity. It's different from watching something on television or in a movie theater. The energy of live theater is a force unmatched.
Theater-going audiences are mostly white, some statistics say up to 77% white. That’s understandable. With the cost of most tickets running anywhere from $40 to several hundred a seat, it is more accessible to white people based on the financial inequity that is the reality in America.
But it’s more than that.
It’s about being able to see someone who looks like you on the stage portrayed as someone other than a servant, slave or mammy. Why would I want to go to the theater if most of the characters who look like me are pigeon-holed into roles that are “less than”? Why would I want to be reminded of the limitations I face because of how my ancestors were oppressed or how people who look like me are still being oppressed because of a lack of equality, reparations and equity? Why would I want to sit through two hours of wasted potential, stolen joy and unlived fulfillment in someone who looks like me? How diminishing. Degrading. And depressing.
Recently, I had the privilege to witness a benchmark in the evolution of theater in the black community here in Pittsburgh.
I attended a performance of The Bluegrass Mile at the Pittsburgh Playwrights. For the first time in my nearly fifty years of going to the theater, the audience was mostly black and included a group of students from the African-American theater program at the University of Kentucky-Louisville.
(photo credit: Pittsburgh Playwrights Theater)
Celebrating its 20th season this year, and dedicated to “producing works of local racially and culturally diverse plays,” Playwright's founder and producing artistic director Mark Southers and his wife, Neicy, purchased the former Madison Elementary School in the Hill District - a group of historically African-American neighborhoods with a rich history in the arts - and built a fabulous theater in what was the auditorium.
The set was a late 20th century living room of a beautiful old house, replete with a gorgeous wood carved bar and lovely furniture. Three pictures hang on the wall at the start of the play. One is the husband of the widow who runs the boarding house. Another is Frederick Douglass. And the last is Harriet Tubman.
Early on, a visitor arrives. The widow who owns the house and one of her borders assume from the fancy carriage parked outside, it’s a white person. They frantically run around the living room flipping the pictures over to reveal portraits of the former white owner of the house, President McKinley and Betsy Ross. This glimpse into an early form of code switching immediately lets you the world they live in.
The play tells the story of two black jockeys, brought to Kentucky to race in the fictional Bluegrass Mile. The winner will automatically be entered to run in the Derby, so the stakes are high. Set against the backdrop of the rural south when slavery had ended only a couple of decades earlier, the senseless vitriol and inability to see anyone of color as human comes to a head when a riot breaks out after the race and one of the horses takes off, jockey in tow, and the animal is later found dead.
It was a different experience to see a play that depicts a piece of black history, filled with racism, discrimination, and violence (as was usually the case), in a room full of black people. It’s one thing to see it with fellow white folks where we get all emotional at the disgraceful and dehumanizing treatment perpetrated upon an entire group of people. It’s something completely different to watch things unfold on stage sitting among those who carry that tragedy, and the deep sadness that accompanies it, in their bones.
It made it a lot more difficult to go home and tuck away what I saw in a corner of my brain. Their presence helped me to feel what I saw on stage in a way that still lives in me. Couple that with the respect Southers, as the playwright,has for the rule specificity is the key to universality and this is a play I won't soon forget.
There are powerful details sprinkled throughout that reveal the intricacies of each character’s internal world. This is important because while our experiences all may contain different details, the emotions born from connecting to another person, to feeling angry, joyful or humiliated resonate with all of us.
It may seem paradoxical, but the more specific the details of the experiences that breathe life into these emotions, the easier it is for people to relate. They remember what it is that made them feel that way, filling in the details from their own lives, and a bond is created. This is what we need if we’re to see each other as members of humanity, not separate because of skin color, bank account balances or degrees.
This is the power of theater. The raw unfiltered energy only present in a live performance anchors inside us and we are able to correlate the emotions shown by the actors to our own lives.
I saw their production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone months ago and I still catch my breath when I think about it. The feelings of being lost, abandoned, powerless and hopeless may not have shown up in my life for the heinous reasons they appear in the lives of the characters, but I know what those feelings feel like. And while I will never fully grasp the tragedies they endured, it deepens my understanding of them.
When asked about the ending, where the sheriff, a white man, chooses to do the right thing in the face of a town ready to lynch the young jockey charged with being responsible for the dead horse, Mark said he wanted to end the story with hope.
Hope that if we understand more deeply the lives of those around us that the natural order will become acceptance, inclusion and unity. Not the separation, divisiveness and antagonism of the world in the past or today. Live theater has the ability to help us build that foundation and I’m grateful each and every time I experience a powerful piece of theater that helps get us closer.
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