Finalist: Soraya Nadia McDonald of The Undefeated

In new Broadway revival, the blinding sunshine of the Territory exposes the violence beneath the romantic myth

Though it hasn’t always been acknowledged, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! has always been a musical about whiteness.

This is important because a new and well-reviewed production is now running on Broadway. Oklahoma! has often been summarized through a lens of racial neutrality as a romantic musical about a woman named Laurey Williams trying to make a choice between two suitors: Jud Fry, a hard-working farmhand who lives in the smokehouse of a farm owned by Laurey and her Aunt Eller. And guitar-strumming Curly McClain, who is more socially adept, but doesn’t offer much beyond a pretty face. Set in the Claremore Indian Territory of Oklahoma in 1906, Oklahoma! delivers a rose-tinted view of history that centers on happy white people whose greatest concern is a town dance that will raise money to build a new school. It’s a classic example of willful erasure and ahistorical mythmaking.

In 1838 and 1839, President Andrew Jackson forced thousands of Native Americans to abandon their homes east of the Mississippi. Even though Oklahoma was the end point of the genocidal forced migration known as the Trail of Tears, Oklahoma! doesn’t feature a single Native American character. In fact, its only explicitly nonwhite character is Ali Hakim, a Persian peddler who seeks romantic encounters that don’t come with marital strings.

Director Daniel Fish’s new, stripped-down revival of Oklahoma! doesn’t play by those rules, though. In this version, now running at Circle in the Square Theater through Jan. 19, Laurey is played by a black woman, Rebecca Naomi Jones. Laurey’s best friend, Ado Annie, is played by Ali Stroker, who uses a wheelchair, the first actress to do so on a Broadway stage. When Stroker won the Tony for best actress in a featured role in a musical in June, she was the first performer who uses a wheelchair to be nominated, much less win.

Suffice it to say, this ain’t your granny’s Oklahoma! The musical, which won the 2019 Tony for best revival, has been popularly characterized as “Sexy Oklahoma!” That’s largely because of the horny howling of its handsome leading man, Damon Daunno, who plays Curly, and its shamelessly libidinous Ado Annie. But I did not find Oklahoma! to be sexy so much as darkly terrifying — and I mean that in a good way.

That’s because this version, which faithfully maintains the original script and lyrics of the 1943 musical while updating the orchestrations with modern arrangements, subjects toxic whiteness and masculinity to the glaring bleach of the noonday sun.

The revival is unique because of its deft interrogation of the whiteness and toxic masculinity that has long been romanticized in the American western, and in the many treacly iterations of Oklahoma! that have been mounted since 1943. This version asks its audience to consider a familiar world in an unfamiliar way: through the eyes of a black woman with little to no physical security or power of her own.

The first thing one notices upon entering Circle in the Square is the aggressive brightness of the room’s lighting (more than a few members of the audience wore sunglasses through the performance). The second is that the walls are lined with racks upon racks upon racks of shotguns.

The lighting turns out to be subversive. Much like a black light held over the surfaces of a sketchy motel room, it illuminates all the ickiness lurking on surfaces that appear otherwise innocuous. It welcomes you to the Oklahoma territory, where flowers fill the prairie and the june bugs zoom, and then it ensures that you cannot turn away from the ugliness that lurks there. “Everything’s going my way” certainly applies to the men of the Territory. But its female residents? Not so much.

It’s strange to see Oklahoma! when the horrors of mass shootings (most recently in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas) are still in the shallow recesses of one’s consciousness. But mostly, I was reminded of violence specifically linked to virulent misogyny, and so Alek Minassian, Elliot Rodger, and George Sodini entered my mind within minutes of the introduction of Jud (Patrick Vaill). Minassian, Rodgers, and Sodini are white men who committed mass murder because they were angry, lonely, and felt entitled to attention from women when they weren’t getting it. Minassian identifies as an “incel,” or involuntary celibate.

There is a rhythm to the news of mass shootings, and one beat in particular is frustratingly metronomic: The killers, more often than not, have a history of abuse or antipathy toward women. In Oklahoma!, Jud is armed with an unshakable crush, a shifty attitude, and a revolver. Vaill imbues Jud with a patina of gentle shyness, underneath which beats a familiar pulse of resentment, entitlement, and a violent temper precariously held in check. Jud might be an excellent farmhand, but he is not a good man. It makes for a terribly dangerous combination for Laurey.

To survive in the modern world, women develop a spidey sense about men who would potentially harm us, and we mold our lives around the avoidance of male aggression. We move to a different subway car if someone stares a little too long, or brushes up a little too close. We slow our gait to let someone pass rather than take the chance that he may be following when we must walk late at night. And we get very good at managing — managing expectations, managing tempers, and managing egos.

The same reality of ever-present male danger is true for the women of the Territory. For them, the most effective way to guard against it is to get married. (Nothing sucks the romance out of courtship quite like knowing you’re seeking a man in hopes that his presence will prevent your rape or murder.) Laurey has a decision to make about who she will choose for the dance and her life afterward: Curly or Jud? By Laurey’s second interaction with the seemingly mild-mannered Jud, I felt my stomach grow queasy with worry. Oda Mae Brown from Ghost made an entrance in my notebook: “Laurey,” I wrote furiously, “You in danger, girl!”

Before Fish reimagined her, Laurey was usually portrayed as a lucky woman blessed with a surfeit of romantic possibilities. Nowhere is that more clear than in Fred Zinneman’s 1955 film adaptation. In Zinneman’s Oklahoma!, Laurey is played by Shirley Jones, a sunny, self-assured blonde whose good looks, tiny waist, and homespun charm are enough to tame any man.

When Shirley Jones sings “Many A New Day,” she’s surrounded by white women pirouetting in bloomers and petticoats, and she’s laying out a philosophy that Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider would come to monetize some four decades later in The Rules, possibly the worst self-help book about dating ever published. Essentially, it is a doctrine that tells women that all their power and moral authority lie in their sexual availability or lack thereof, also known as playing hard to get.

But this display of performative reluctance isn’t an indication of power, so much as the lack of it, especially when you consider the presence of armed threats like Jud. From the beginning of the musical, Aunt Eller is telling Curly how much her niece likes him, no matter how much Laurey’s behavior indicates the opposite. It’s strategic: Aunt Eller’s trying to provide some security for Laurey, in the limited way that she can, by playing matchmaker. Sexual violation is a constant threat for women, even for Ado Annie, who is generally portrayed as a ditsy, well-meaning slut with her rendition of the song “I Cain’t Say No.”

Stroker’s Ado Annie, on the other hand, delivers a rollicking, proudly sex positive rendition of the song, a recognition of the character’s agency.

Still, in both scenarios, Ado Annie’s choices are protected by her father’s ever-present shotgun — to a point. She may get around, and she may like it, but she’s still got to marry somebody, and furthermore, someone with money. Ado Annie’s father insists that a man vying for her affections have at least $50 to his name before he’ll let him marry her. (Remember, it’s 1906.)

Laurey doesn’t really have two viable options so much as she’s faced with making a choice between a man who will almost certainly kill her if he doesn’t get what he wants and a well-meaning dunce who thinks the height of being gentlemanly means getting down to the dirty business of dispatching the Territory’s resident incel.

Jones is not the only member of the Oklahoma! company who is black, but her blackness serves to reinforce just how vulnerable and disenfranchised Laurey is in a place where men hold an overwhelming amount of sociopolitical power and women have nearly none. That social order is enforced and maintained with guns:

• When Ali Hakim won’t commit to Ado Annie, her father threatens him with a shotgun.
• When Jud and Curly want to intimidate each other, they shoot holes into the roof and wall of the smokehouse.
• When Laurey finds herself in need of protection from one bad man, it comes from another wielding — you guessed it — a gun.

Jones plays Laurey as a woman moving through the world with tense, uneasy reluctance. At times, she exhibits an attraction to Curly, but it never seems to permeate too deeply, perhaps with the exception of the dream ballet (danced with magnetic athleticism by Gabrielle Hamilton) that explores Laurey’s subconscious. It concludes with Laurey’s id scooching crotch first offstage toward Curly — she’s made her “choice.”

But even when Laurey agrees to marry Curly and enters the stage in her wedding dress, she’s bereft of the glowing, floaty ebullience typically associated with brides. Instead, the subtle hesitations in Jones’ movements and the drawn expression of her face leaves the viewer wishing poor Laurey had a trusted maid of honor to ask, “You OK, sis? I got the horses in the back if you want to ride east ’til we can’t ride no more.” It’s a beautifully crafted performance, full of simmering internal contradictions that Laurey dare not raise aloud. She seems more resigned than anything to spend her life with Curly, if only because he provides protection from the Juds of the world and she knows that she needs it.

I could not help but see parallels between Laurey and the protagonist of Test Pattern, a new film from director Shatara Michelle Ford that premiered earlier this year at BlackStar Film Festival and is currently seeking distribution. Test Pattern explores the aftermath of sexual assault for a black woman living in Austin, Texas, named Renesha. Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) is in a loving interracial relationship when she is sexually assaulted during a celebratory night out with a friend. (Coincidentally, the two works share an actor; Will Brill plays Hakim in Oklahoma! and Renesha’s boyfriend Evan in Test Pattern.) Like Laurey, Renesha ends up spending a great deal of time managing the emotions of two white men, one of whom is ostensibly “good” and the other who is “bad.” It turns out the two men are not so different. Like Jud and Curly, they both prioritize their own wants over the needs of the black woman who is the object of their desire or devotion. This is not accidental. In both the Territory of 1906 and modern-day Austin, the world is constructed to serve these men, and that’s what they’ve come to expect. This is their version of neutral.

Oklahoma! becomes a jaunty horror show when Laurey is splattered with Jud’s blood on her wedding day after Curly guns him down and the entire company belts out a lively rendition of “Oklahoma.” The residents of the territory ignore the cancer infecting their community in favor of singing, dancing, and the avoidance of discomfort, in much the same way that no amount of tragic deaths seems to spur meaningful action on gun control.

Ultimately, Oklahoma! provides a nuanced opportunity for audiences to reexamine systems of power from the view of those least protected by them. The artists will even serve you chili and cornbread during the show’s intermission. The timing is key — better to eat a bowl before pore Jud is daid, when its contents can’t remind you of his bullet-blasted innards.

In new Broadway production, actress Christiani Pitts steps into the role first made famous by Fay Wray

When King Kong opened on Broadway recently, actress Christiani Pitts became the first black woman in history to play Ann Darrow, the legendary damsel in distress who gets carted off by a gargantuan silverback gorilla on his way to the top of the Empire State Building.

Before Pitts’ casting, Darrow had been portrayed in film by a parade of young white blondes. Fay Wray famously originated the role in the 1933 film directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. A 1976 remake starred Jessica Lange, and director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) resurrected the story again in 2005 with Naomi Watts.

The Broadway musical, a $35 million production that stars a 2,000-pound puppet, is a commercial success despite being almost universally derided by critics. But consideration of Pitts’ role as Darrow has been scarce. Her casting raises plenty of questions about whether a character like King Kong can, or should, ever truly be divorced from the context of prejudice and panic that birthed him. Since Cooper and Schoedsack first brought him to the screen, Kong has been an enduring symbol for white Americans’ imagined fears of black male sexuality.

Still, this new production of King Kong comes amid a flowering of race-neutral casting that has led to black actors in some of the biggest roles available. A black woman (Denée Benton) played Natasha in an adaptation of a segment of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Another (Alexia Khadime) portrayed Elphaba Thropp in Wicked. And still another (Noma Dumezweni) currently plays Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. On Broadway, Aaron Burr and George Washington are supposed to be black and Norm Lewis can be the half-masked phantom of the Palais Garnier.

What makes Ann Darrow so different? Well, for one, her whiteness has always been central to the role. Americans didn’t historically worry about black men attacking black women, but they did worry about white women, hence the effort to dehumanize black men by using an ape to symbolize them. Is it even possible to see King Kong as merely an ape? It’s a question Pitts has given a great deal of thought.

“I would love to see that happen, but unfortunately I don’t think that we can,” Pitts told me recently. “And I think that it’s important to acknowledge it, especially because of when it came out. … Although it would be great to be able to watch that film and disregard the subliminal narrative, it’s almost important that we do see it and do realize that for one of the first action movies with talking, there’s a racial undertone. I think that has huge historical importance.”

Before we can understand what it means for Pitts to play Darrow, we must first understand what her co-star symbolizes, and the troubling history behind him.

That’s because the story of the giant gorilla kidnapped from his home on Skull Island is a nesting doll of racialized anxiety, mixed metaphors and white hubris. It’s also a thematic follow-up to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Both films center on the fear of black men sexually victimizing white women. It’s just that King Kong uses an ape instead of white men in blackface to convey the threat.

When Kong was released in 1933, it reflected the misery of a country in the midst of the Great Depression. Bread and soup lines abound in Cooper and Schoedsack’s depiction of New York. Poverty, along with a wish for celebrity, drive Ann to board a ship to an unknown destination with a strange director named Carl Denham only hours after she’s met him.

They sail to a secret island enveloped in fog that’s inhabited by people who’ve never experienced contact with the outside world. Denham, Darrow and the ship’s crew arrive as the natives are about to sacrifice one of their maidens to the giant gorilla that lives in the jungle beyond their village gates: King Kong.

In the film versions of Kong, the black natives kidnap Darrow from the ship under the cover of darkness and offer her, terrified and screaming, to the ape king. Denham, the crew and the love interest she’s cultivated aboard the ship go back to the island to save her, with many of them dying along the way. They fall off cliffs, get eaten by nightmarish beasts and invoke Kong’s rage. Meanwhile, Kong takes a liking to Darrow — or at least decides not to eat her the way he has all the black virgins who’ve been offered to him in the past. Once Darrow is rescued, Denham always insists on subduing Kong and bringing him back to New York. There, he sells tickets to a show where a giant ape in chains is beguiled by a blonde in a white evening gown.

Of course, Kong’s handlers overestimate the power of American steel to subdue the wild animal, who goes nuts on stage amid the flashes from newspaper photographers. He takes off with Darrow, wreaks havoc on the city, climbs with her to the top of the Empire State Building, and finally gets shot down and killed by military planes.

Uncivilized, inferior brown people, the irresistible white woman and the destruction of an oversize symbol of black virility are the recurring tropes of King Kong. Kong’s zombielike, loincloth-sporting worshippers kidnap Darrow and shove her through a gate with a locking mechanism that doubles as an unmistakable metaphor for penetrative sex. They’re never, never depicted as sympathetic. Each subsequent film adaptation changes slightly to reflect the time in which it’s made, but those key elements remain.

John Guillermin’s 1976 version reflects a world defined by the energy crisis. Kong is taken back to New York in the hold of an oil vessel, supplanting the millions of gallons of inky black gold that had been its intended cargo. In Jackson’s bloated 2005 take on the story, the human natives of Skull Island barely register as people but instead are presented as a feral, languageless horde with a predilection for decorating with human remains. They emerge from the environment, barely distinguishable as human and covered in mud, similar to the undead crew of the Black Pearl in Pirates of the Caribbean: “part of the crew, part of the ship.”

Before writing the original King Kong, Cooper and Schoedsack had embarked on their own Heart of Darkness-style journey. They traveled by ship to Ethiopia, where they met the prince who would later become Haile Selassie I. But Cooper and Schoedsack’s America was also in the midst of a lynching epidemic. The Birth of a Nation, a silent Civil War epic, had been released 18 years before King Kong, yet the violent racism reflected and encouraged by the movie was ever-present.

Its costume design inspired the white robes and hoods we’ve come to singularly associate with the Ku Klux Klan, and its release single-handedly resurrected the organization after years of dormancy. It was wish fulfillment for whites resentful of a changing society in which Jack Johnson fought his way to the world heavyweight championship title in 1908 and retained it for the next seven years. Not only was a large, dark-skinned black man the best fighter in the world, he had a white wife, much to the consternation of many, many racists.

The Birth of a Nation told its audience they were right to consider Johnson and men who looked like him to be an affront to white Christian sensibilities. Its depiction of the white woman as the pinnacle of virtue, who would rather pitch herself off a cliff than face the clutches of a cartoonishly evil black predator, helped justify a wave of extrajudicial torture and murder against thousands of black men that lasted for decades. (Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit,” the protest dirge written by Abel Meeropol, in 1939.)

Griffith’s ideas about black male predation clearly informed King Kong, to the point that Cooper and Schoedsack had trouble being honest about its true villain. That would be Denham, whose love of money and fame dooms everyone who goes into business with him. Rather, they absolve Denham (and white men writ large) for his responsibility in Kong’s tragic death. The film ends with Denham proclaiming, “Oh, no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty that killed the beast.”

This is the baggage that has followed the story of Kong all the way to the stage of New York’s Broadway Theatre: an unwieldy albatross of fear, resentment, control and racial hierarchy that is enforced with firearms and gas bombs.

CAN AN APE EVER JUST BE AN APE?

Kong may be a tragic hero, but he and his species remain inextricably conflated with stereotypes of untamed animal savagery, lasciviousness and other ugliness that gets heaped onto black people.

There has arguably never been a less racially neutral animal in the history of the country. King Kong opened on Broadway the same year Roseanne Barr was fired from the reboot of her eponymous hit show after calling Valerie Jarrett, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, the progeny of the “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes.” The words “ape” and “gorilla” remain favored pejoratives for racists seeking to malign Serena Williams and Michelle Obama, and they also persist overseas, where soccer fans are known to pelt black players with bananas. When LeBron James was pictured on the cover of Vogue with model Gisele Bündchen in 2008, evoking the memory of Kong and Darrow, then-ESPN columnist Jemele Hill admonished the basketball star to “be more careful with his image.”

“It’s make-believe on the surface, but when you dive in and look at it from a different lens, the truth becomes really harsh, and not only was saying a black person was a monkey an insult, but you look back historically when black people were three-fifths of a person and were put in the same category as livestock during slavery,” Pitts said. “It’s really, really, really disgusting when you dive into what it can mean to so many people.”

All of that makes it exceptionally difficult to accept Kong as a positive figure, even when the new Broadway version transforms him into a fearsome but misunderstood softy instead of a god requiring human sacrifice. (This version, by writer Jack Thorne, has blessedly done away with the human inhabitants of Skull Island entirely.) Does the fact that Kong is now a sympathetic figure matter more than the racist conflation of black people with apes? Can it? I’m not so sure.

If Kong were widely interpreted as good, Denzel Washington’s indelible line from Training Day wouldn’t have nearly the same effect. His character, the corrupt cop Alonzo, doesn’t yell, “King Kong ain’t got s— on me!” because he’s tragically misunderstood. It’s a chest-beating declaration that Alonzo ain’t nuthin’ to F’ wit, ya dig?

Nevertheless, we must also consider the atmosphere in which Darrow and Kong exist on Broadway, where a perceived racelessness of certain characters is more commonplace. Shouldn’t we extend the same generosity of imagination to the character of Darrow?

Perhaps, if in Thorne’s version, a gorilla is just a gorilla. Except he’s not. When Kong is revealed in New York, he’s constrained by massive shackles that look like a supersize version of ones a visitor might see in a slavery exhibition at the Blacksonian. Kong is trapped, stolen from his homeland and brought to America to make a profit at the behest of Denham, the white man who owns the rights to his exploitation.

Furthermore, Darrow feels guilt for her complicity in Kong’s capture and weirdly, in expressing her remorse to him, ends up as the black woman who sold out the gorilla/black man in service to her own ambitions. Darrow is both a guilty, opportunistic accomplice and the heroine who tries to set Kong free.

Is that … better?

Pitts struggled with how to approach this.

“It became a heavy load on me,” she said of the history that surrounds King Kong. “These are all things that I have known, and that I’ve learned about, but it’d been a long time since I sat with this material.

“My character, being in her early 20s in the 1930s, didn’t have the access to this kind of research. She was just living it. So what that means for her is that she doesn’t exactly know the trauma until she’s in it. So I had a lot of challenges in dealing with the comment on slavery in a very nuanced way, because [she doesn’t realize] until it’s happening right in front of her eyes, which is why there’s a moment in the show where she sees Kong in chains, and that is the first time that she makes the connection.

“The first time I read the script, and the second the captain says that we’re going to rope Kong and take him to America, that was the first time that I as the actor noticed the connection. But I had to realize that this person [Darrow] is living it. Her connection to slavery, which is her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, knowing that it’s something that happened in the past but that she wasn’t still reliving. It wasn’t until she actually sees the chains in front of her eyes that she has to sit with the connection.”

Characters can be racialized, or they can be raceless, but they can’t be both. Inside the Broadway Theatre, the audience is asked to see Darrow as simply a lady and Kong as a tortured circus spectacle of an animal. But taking in King Kong without some twinge of ethical compromise requires either Magritte-level mental acrobatics or complete ignorance of the role of race in American history. In each of those circumstances, it doesn’t really matter what color Darrow is.

Just as each version of King Kong says something about the era in which it’s created, so too does each version of Ann Darrow.

Previous iterations of Darrow have been helpless (Wray), dumb to the point of absurdity (Lange) or nice ladies who just want a job in showbiz (Wray, Lange and Watts). Their perceived virtue is always a key part of the character. Lange ends up surviving a yacht wreck because rather than sit with a bunch of men watching Deep Throat, she goes to the deck in protest. She winds up joining the journey to Skull Island when the crew of the oil vessel spots her drifting on a lifeboat and hauls her aboard.

She develops a friendship with Kong, and when she’s rescued, her love interest (played by Jeff Bridges) cannot understand why she harbors an ounce of sympathy for the beast.

“He risked his life to save me,” she explains.

Bridges gazes patronizingly into the eyes of his imbecilic beloved. “No, honey,” he tells her. “He tried to rape you.”

Every version of King Kong featuring a white woman as Darrow has relied upon the threat of rape as motivation for the ship’s crew to return to Skull Island and save her. They perpetuate Griffith’s original white knight archetype, with Darrow as the recipient of their benevolent sexism. Griffith’s idea that white female virginity must be preserved against all odds is one that Lange’s character has internalized, even in a world where sexual attitudes have been transformed by Helen Gurley Brown and Hugh Hefner.

But transposing these characteristics onto the body of a black woman is more intellectually cumbersome. While white female sexual purity is seen as a commodity to be preserved for the sole enjoyment of white men, black women, especially in the 1930s, were seen as opportunities for sexual practice. Whatever harm they experienced was no one’s concern but their own.

Pitts’ Darrow, then, cannot be helpless and in need of constant protection. Instead, Pitts imbues her with a plucky bravery one might associate with the Dorothy of The Wiz. Pitts’ Darrow has no interest in being victimized. When Kong roars at her and beats his chest, she does the same right back.

Like Dorothy, once plopped into unfamiliar environs, Pitts’ Darrow sets about finding her way home and calling upon her own nerve and determination to do so. She comes to regard Kong as an animal like the ones on the farm where she lived before leaving to pursue her acting dreams in New York. Just as Dorothy sees past their shortcomings to befriend a tin man, a lion, and a scarecrow in an unfamiliar land, Darrow makes an unlikely connection with a wild gorilla.

Pitts’ Ann is adventurous, independent and determined. But she’s also a black woman who, like Kong, is ensconced in a production that doesn’t seem to have taken full account of what that means beyond a mealy-mouthed, post-racial conclusion that anyone can play anything! And it’s totally fine! Progressive, even! Perhaps, more than anything else, that’s what ties Kong and his black Darrow together on Broadway, even more so than their victimization at the hands of the arrogant Denham. Both remain suspended in a parable that, however well-intentioned, remains grafted onto a fundamentally racist foundation.

Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway adaptation ignores the racist Atticus who Harper Lee described in ‘Go Set a Watchman’

Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles: Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird was snubbed Tuesday morning in the Tony nominations for best play, thereby avoiding a disaster of Green Bookian proportions at this summer’s awards ceremony.

That sigh you hear is this writer exhaling in a mixture of both relief and schadenfreude. Since its debut in December, To Kill a Mockingbird has been showered with rapturous plaudits, suggesting it was a shoo-in for a best play nomination. Instead, the nominations went to Choir Boy, The Ferryman, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, Ink and What the Constitution Means to Me.

Mockingbird received nominations for lighting design, sound design, scene design, costume design, score and for performances by Jeff Daniels, Gideon Glick and Celia Keenan-Bolger. Bartlett Sher was also nominated for direction. But it struck out on the big prize, and deservedly so.

This new version of Mockingbird perpetuates one of the most pernicious, seductive lies in the history of this country: That racism, and all that results from it, can be blamed on a few cartoonishly evil characters. I have a name for these characters and the lie they have come to represent. I call them TROTs: Those Racists Over There. TROTs are scapegoats for racism, and they are everywhere, but they seem to proliferate in films that get nominated for awards. There’s Daisy Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy, Hilly Holbrook in The Help, Dixon in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and every Southern white person who is mean to Don Shirley in Green Book.

Thanks to Sorkin, the TROT takes up residence eight times a week in the Shubert Theatre. His name is Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller), the mouth-breathing bigot who rapes his daughter and falsely accuses a handicapped black man named Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe) of attacking her.

The TROT exists in a symbiotic relationship with another trope: the white savior, who relies on the TROT so that he or she may be defined as noble, principled and morally unblemished. (Or at least, not so blemished that whatever ails them can’t be remedied by the end of the story with the aid of a psychological helpmeet. In Mockingbird, whatever perspective Atticus Finch (Jeff Daniels) may be lacking, his domestic, Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), dryly provides.)

But the lie that white people can be divided into distinct groups of TROTs and saviors is one that Mockingbird’s original author doesn’t believe, as evidenced by the information Harper Lee introduces about her legendarily heroic country lawyer in Go Set a Watchman.

Set 20 years after the fateful summer in which 6-year-old Scout Finch witnesses her father defend Robinson, the 2015 sequel to Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel provides a complicated and less flattering picture of Atticus than the one Sorkin valorizes through Daniels. While Lee’s Mockingbird supplies a picture of a man as seen through the admiring eyes of his young daughter, her sequel removes Scout’s rose-colored glasses and subjects Atticus to the scrutiny of a grown woman realizing that her father is not a superhero after all.

Most children discover their parents are not as perfect as they once thought. But in adapting Mockingbird for the stage, Sorkin ignored Watchman. He’s still holding fast to the notion that education and liberalism somehow flush out racism in white people like a detox tea. Sorkin’s Atticus refers to the Ewells and people like them as “ignorant citizens stuck in the old ways.” They’re easy to identify, condemn and distance oneself from.

This Mockingbird reassures the Good White People that make up its audience that they are, in fact, good. Should they need to outwardly telegraph their goodness, the production offers hoodies for sale in the basement of the Shubert that simply say “TRAYVON.” More than anything, the play encourages them to see themselves in Atticus, even after the woman who created Atticus told us his goodness was a lie.

Atticus Finch was never as perfect as Sorkin made him. Lee told us so in Go Set a Watchman. He used to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the same organization that Sorkin’s Finch looks down on Bob Ewell for daring to fraternize with. In Mockingbird, Lee wrote that Finch was a descendant of slave owners. In Watchman, the same man who vigorously defended Tom Robinson is also a bigot who despises the NAACP and refers to its lawyers as “buzzards.”

“The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people,” he says. He asks the adult Scout, who goes by Jean Louise, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

Sorkin, then, creates Finch from a position of willful ignorance, which proves useful for avoiding feather-ruffling and culpability. Atticus was always racist, and Watchman provides an opportunity to see how individual racism provides the building blocks for structural inequality. But Sorkin’s Mockingbird reduces structural racism to little more than a figment of the imagination. Somehow, despite the fact that Sheriff Heck Tate, Judge Taylor and Tom Robinson’s own attorney, Atticus, all seem to agree that Ewell is clearly lying, their hands are tied and Robinson is doomed. They are utterly blameless for it.

In a recent talk at the Public Theater, White Noise playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and director Oskar Eustis shared their thinly veiled opinions of Mockingbird.

“There’s a piece of fiction that’s being staged uptown, and it posits that in a small Southern town in the ’50s or early ’60s, that in a small Southern town in that time, that the top lawyer in town [the white lawyer], the top judge in town and the white sheriff in town are all unbelievably enlightened and progressive on the subject of race relations,” Eustis said. “That only the poor white trash hate the black people.

“You sit there watching this critically acclaimed piece and you just go, ‘What world is this describing where the problem of racism is solely the problem of poor white people and the town’s white power structure had nothing to do with it?’ I mean, forget now. We’re talking about the South in the ’60s!”

Sorkin has been repeatedly praised for updating To Kill a Mockingbird for a modern audience, though I would question just how modern. It is the sort of play that either seems to be for white people who love Martin Luther King Jr. but who’ve never read Letter from Birmingham Jail or who cannot imagine that it is they who are being excoriated in it.

“[Mockingbird] is describing the desire of people of means to point to impoverished white people as the problem,” Parks said. “This is exactly what’s happening now.”

In the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro, director Raoul Peck includes a quotation from James Baldwin about the Birmingham of the 1960s clinging to Jim Crow.

“White people are astounded by Birmingham, black people aren’t,” Baldwin wrote. “They are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don’t want to believe, still, less act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country.”

This is the purpose of the TROT: to reinforce the delusion that the Bob Ewells of the world are Martians so that everyone else can tell themselves they are Atticus Finch (or, at least, who we thought Atticus was before the release of Watchman). The soothing blindness of works such as Sorkin’s Mockingbird, and the absolving embrace they offer to Good White People, is popular. It’s lucrative too. At the end of April, the show broke its own weekly Broadway box-office record for the fourth time. Its total grosses have topped $36 million since previews began in November.

But there is a cost to TROT art and the comforting lie it perpetuates, one that is borne by millions of real Tom Robinsons that America continues to persecute, in ways large and small, personal and structural. Good for the Tony voters for recognizing as much.

A critic seeks out black utopias in ‘Ain’t No Mo’,’ Beyoncé’s ‘Homecoming’ and David Byrne’s Broadway show

This summer, I was strolling the streets of Hell’s Kitchen with a friend and fellow Howard alumnus. We’d just left a performance of BLKS, the off-Broadway Aziza Barnes play that made me laugh so hard I had a coughing fit in the middle of the performance.

BLKS is about three young black women who live together in Brooklyn, New York, who are adults on paper, but still trying to get it together like real grown-ups. The play opens with a young woman named Octavia in a state of loud comical distress because she’s discovered a mole on her clitoris, which prompts several existential crises, all of which are addressed with copious amounts of brown liquor and weed.

During the curtain call, the sounds of Fast Life Yungstaz’s (F.L.Y.) “Swag Surfin’ ” blasted through the walls of the theater. The audience, mostly young black people in their 20s and 30s like my friend and me, began to sway, almost involuntarily. There was so much joyous black energy in the space, and I wanted to pocket as much of it as I could.

For a few, brief moments, Barnes and director Robert O’Hara had birthed a black utopia — not in the play itself, but in the room at large — where we could all recognize ourselves on the stage. We could guffaw until tears streamed down our cheeks, knowing that BLKS had been created with our gaze in mind, as opposed to one chiefly concerned with explaining black people to white audiences. We were transported, in the way that I have found myself transported by Alvin Ailey’s Revelations or Black Panther or Homecoming.

And then we were released back into the world, wandering in search of the next Wakanda.

Visions of utopia tend to sprout in times of peril as a way of envisioning a social perfection that seems light-years away. They’re a bit like quarks, those subatomic particles that can’t be directly observed but somehow we still believe they exist. Even when rendered on stage or screen, utopias are fragile, ethereal, momentary.

Three standout works from 2019 sought to create or interrogate utopias and what it takes to render them. The play Ain’t No Mo’, which ran at the Public Theater, was a shattering examination of the cost of creating a place like Wakanda. In Beyoncé’s Homecoming documentary, viewers witness how the artist created a black utopia for two performances at Coachella. And in Broadway’s American Utopia, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne calls upon the work of a woman who’s built a futuristic dystopia in song for some much-needed realism in a show that prods its audience to rethink what’s possible.

All three are additions to a vast tradition replete with the folklore of flying Africans, and the imagined worlds that sprouted from figures including W.E.B. Du Bois (The Comet), Parliament-Funkadelic, Martin Delany (Blake; or, The Huts of America), Octavia Butler (The Parable Series), Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Faith Ringgold (Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines), Solange, Lionel Hampton, Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okorafor, and even Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key.

Black utopias exist as a coping mechanism for impatience and incrementalism. They foster dreams, hope, creativity, and idealism. They also keep us from punching our fellow humans in the mouth every time one of them mentions something about the moral arc of the universe being long, but bending toward justice, especially when the invocation of this phrase is employed in the wake of some wholly preventable instance of racial injustice.

America, in many ways, is a black dystopia, but it’s one that provides a vision for betterment within its founding documents. Making the country less awful for black people, and for society at large, has been a long, frustrating, violent, multigenerational project since 1619, one that requires vision and imagination beyond the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights.

“There’s something to be learned from black utopian reflections that can energize our democracy,” said Alex Zamalin, the director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Detroit Mercy and the author of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea From Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism. “The main thrust of the tradition, both the utopian and anti-utopian tradition in black culture, is to try to think about and theorize how freedom can be achieved, specifically black freedom can be achieved in conditions of white supremacy and racism. … The argument is that there needs to be some way to transcend not only racism, but the injustices of capitalism, of a security state, of instrumental thinking, of dehumanized thinking … [Black utopias] offer really important resources for how to deal with injustice and domination and inequality in the present.”

Supernatural escape, like that which was popularized in the Virginia Hamilton children’s book, The People Could Fly, first published in 1985, is a common path in the African American folk tradition. In The Annotated African American Folk Tales, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar dedicate an entire subsection to variations on the stories of enslaved Africans, who, after enduring vicious treatment at the hands of white owners and overseers, simply spread their arms, ascended skyward, and flew home. Such tales called upon an African magic that had not yet been extinguished through the barbarism of chattel slavery. They were passed down through oral storytelling traditions and eventually recorded by organizations such as the Georgia Writers Project.

Were the Africans ascending heavenward or heading east? The stories are open to dual interpretations, but the end goal is always the same: to go someplace better, which is why Gates and Tatar include the spiritual “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” when discussing flying Africans.

Heaven isn’t just a Christian utopia. In the context of black liberation, it’s a place of rest, a place that’s free from violence. No one gets racially profiled or whipped or lynched or tortured or raped in heaven. No one is forced to clear forests and pick cotton and cook and breastfeed someone else’s baby while your own goes hungry. The idea of a place free from white supremacy became deeply intertwined with spirituality.

As America has evolved, so have African American notions of utopia, which segue from visions like that of 16th-century English writer Sir Thomas More because they are fed by a healthy sense of skepticism about the world that produced them.

“The kind of white, Western, European tradition of utopianism is so concerned with finding a land filled with milk and honey and a paradise on earth, that they’re not really thinking clearly about the way that identity and lived experience can really frustrate and prevent certain idealistic visions of becoming a reality,” Zamalin said.

Similarly, there’s a fault line between ideas of utopia that include egalitarianism from inception and ones that treat it as a side project. The former tend to be heavily influenced by womanism. Black Panther and Homecoming reinforce the notion that women can often be more focused on community uplift as a whole, rather than enormous success for a few. In the words of theologian Preston N. Williams: “The hope is always for an altered status of blacks as a group and not simply as single persons.”

Ain’t No Mo’, Homecoming, and American Utopia each provide different ways for examining the arguments, contradictions, and compromises in the black utopian tradition.

Ain’t No Mo’

Before the action begins in playwright Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’, the audience is given pens and paper and asked to write down things that black people have contributed to America. After each person has written as many things as they like, the papers are deposited into a prop called “Miss Bag.”

The play is part meditation on an imagined mass black exodus from the United States and part homage to George C. Wolfe’s 1986 play, The Colored Museum. Cooper presents vignettes of black life, interspersed with the musings of Peaches, a flight attendant working Flight 1619, the very last flight reserved for black people leaving America to find their genetic homelands in Africa. It’s as if the Andre 3000 line from “International Players Anthem (I Choose You)” came to life onstage: “Spaceships don’t come equipped with rearview mirrors.”

In one scene, Peaches, who is a drag queen, is on the phone trying to persuade a friend to get to the airport because there are no more flights to this black utopia.

“I don’t know what to tell you, ’cause if you stay here, you only got two choices for guaranteed housing and that’s either a cell or a coffin,” Peaches says. “After this flight, there will be no more black folk left in this country, and I know y’all don’t wanna be the only ones left behind because them m—–f—–s will try to put you in a museum or make you do watermelon shows at SeaWorld and s—. Hurry up, or I will give your seat to some of the Latinos on standby … ”

In this view of America, the idea that white people are unable and unwilling to remake America as an antiracist beacon of freedom and equality is a given. The only thing that can create a black utopia is to flee and subject the American experiment to the fate of an Etch A Sketch: Shake the picture until it’s blank, and start over.

This idea of abandoning America and starting over can be traced back to a debate among abolitionists in the 1830s, Zamalin said.

“The militant black abolitionists say, ‘Look, we don’t want to leave the United States. We don’t know what’s in Africa. We don’t have the resources to make a life there. We don’t want to make a life there. Why not fundamentally transform our condition in the United States and then that’ll broaden democracy for all?’ ” Zamalin said. “There’s this presumption that … somehow there would be a sacrifice, when black citizens leave, only for black citizens. But the truth is, what these abolitionists were saying was, black citizens, because they have experienced bondage and oppression, will be a crucial force to then align with poor white folks, with women, in order to struggle for a better democracy for everybody.

“That becomes a kind of theme of some utopian thought, especially at the end of the 19th century, which is that in order to have a successful and healthy, radical democracy, where folks are treated as ends in themselves, where they’re treated with basic human dignity, abolishing racism, ending slavery, later Jim Crow … too often there’s this presumption that the question is, are black people going to make certain sacrifices.

“But one thing that’s forgotten is what the utopian tradition stresses: If we fail to talk about racial liberation, we will also fail to talk about economic liberation, gender liberation. And black citizens are a crucial force in, and historically have been, in agitating for these things.”

Homecoming

Ain’t No Mo’ is chiefly concerned with the costs of leaving a flawed America in favor of an unfamiliar Valhalla. With Homecoming, Beyoncé created her own utopia.

When she performed at the Coachella Music Festival in 2018 as the first black woman to headline the event, Beyoncé cast herself as a breaker of chains, as Nefertiti, and as Malcolm X (“Bad m—–f—-/God complex/motivate your a–/call me Malcolm X,” she sings on “Don’t Hurt Yourself”). And she did so within a world where she was the chief creator and facilitator, and which she documented and distributed globally via Netflix.

“As a black woman, I used to feel like the world wanted me to stay in my little box,” Beyoncé explained in Homecoming. “And black women often feel underestimated. I wanted us to be proud of not only the show, but the process, proud of the struggle, thankful for the beauty that comes with a painful history, and rejoice in the pain, rejoice in the imperfections and the wrongs that are so damn right. And I wanted everyone to feel grateful for their curves, their sass, their honesty. Thankful for their freedom.”

Coachella provided the opportunity to fashion a specific black utopia: Beytopia. Where there was nothing but sand, a pyramid made from stadium bleachers materialized. A temporary oasis was populated with the artifacts of historically black colleges: marching bands, Greek-letter steppers, J-setting majorettes, dancers, and the black national anthem.

For two performances, the world’s biggest pop star reigned over a world of her own making. It was a world that took its inspiration from Nina Simone, who is quoted in Homecoming declaring that “To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world; Black people.”

“I wanted every person who that has ever been dismissed to feel like they were on that stage, killing ’em. Killing ’em,” Beyoncé says in the Homecoming film.

The further you go back in the history of black utopias, the less concerned they tend to be with gender equality.

“One important theme throughout the tradition is the battle between are you simply creating an American society with the free market, with capitalism, with profit-making, with the security state and giving black people freedom within that. Or, in other words, is it basically American capitalism, national security, so on and so forth but without racism? Or are you articulating a kind of completely different bold vision, socialist? That’s definitely a tension because, especially in the 19th century, a lot of the major black utopians are pro-capitalist,” Zamalin said. “They’re not really thinking deeply about gender. The person I’m thinking about is Martin Delany. He’s the first black nationalist. Progressively, as the years go by, there’s much more concern with these questions, but it’s still always a question and it’s always a debate. Is this kind of new black community or utopian space actually going to be free of all the things in America that create inequality? Or are they going to be smuggled in?”

In a modern-day take, we can watch Key and Peele’s sketch “Negrotown,” a comedic broadside against systemic racism, in which the only specific mention of black women is a one-off joke about Negrotown being a place where white women aren’t present to steal black men away.

Beytopia was decidedly more egalitarian, with Beyoncé reorienting the world she’d created around one black woman (herself) as a stand-in for black women the world over. In Beytopia, women who have, in Beyoncé’s words, “had enough of the bulls—” can appropriate black fraternal step culture. Black women run the show. Black men get their time in the spotlight, but they don’t get to monopolize it.

Beyoncé deployed Malcolm X to spell out the reasoning that merited such a decision: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected woman in America is the black woman. The most neglected woman in America is the black woman.”

It might be true in America, but it wouldn’t be true in Beytopia. “We were able to create a free, safe space where none of us were marginalized.”

Homecoming is a diaspora-spanning work of cultural curation. Its breadth and variety illuminate a corner of the stakes of the departure Ain’t No Mo’ asks us to consider. Letting go of everything black people have given to America requires, among other things, cutting off everything that undergirds Homecoming. Why do we have to give it up? And why don’t we want to? Because we feel ownership of those things. Because they are American. And we, too, sing America.

American Utopia

The seeming outlier in these three works is Byrne’s American Utopia, a touring show that’s currently on Broadway until Feb. 16. Byrne’s show is not about a black utopia, but a collection of utopias united under the umbrella of America. I found it extraordinarily touching that Byrne recognized and admired something familiar in Monáe’s work. Through her albums, the singer birthed a fictional, Afrofuturist universe called Metropolis where her android alter-ego, Cindi Mayweather, is always on the run.

Given that Byrne opens American Utopia singing in a nasal monotone while stroking a model of a human brain, it’s fitting that one artist thoroughly enchanted with weirdness and rejecting authoritarianism would identify with Monáe. American Utopia is a celebration of Byrne’s hits, including “This Must Be The Place,” “Slippery People,” and “Burning Down the House.” The musicians and dancers who accompany him are a multiculti array of folks who seem to have discovered a wellspring of joy. I haven’t seen happier black people all year than the ones on stage with Byrne.

But rather than play one of Monáe’s many songs from the Metropolis universe, which chronicles the fight against a dystopian society, Byrne chose “Hell You Talmbout.” He’d heard her sing it, he said, at the Women’s March in Washington in 2017, and it touched him so much that he asked if he could include it in the American Utopia show.

“Hell You Talmbout” is a protest song, seemingly as endless as “John Brown’s Body,” because it relies on a repeated chorus cataloging the names of black people whose lives were ended by police violence. Earlier iterations included a call-and-response invoking Walter Scott, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland. By the time the show played in October, Byrne and his band were encouraging their audience to say the names of Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson. Here we were, forcing ourselves not to forget the newly dead while recognizing the hopelessness incurred by their presence on this list. Some in the largely white audience participated in the call-and-response, but I could also see faces that were perplexed, even irritated.

I shouted until I was exhausted and tears ran down my face. At least we could acknowledge our own helplessness and scream about it in community. I was still shaking as the band moved on to “One Fine Day,” still shaking when, during the curtain call, Byrne reminded the audience that there were volunteers in the lobby of the theater registering Americans to vote.

Byrne, a Scottish immigrant who became a naturalized citizen because he believed in the American experiment, accomplished something I’d begun to think was impossible: He made me feel hopeful. American Utopia wasn’t just a celebration of one man’s vision of an ideal state, but the presentation of many, without hierarchy. The uniformity of the performers’ gray suits and their bare feet, across different types of bodies and races and expressions of gender identity, were an effort to erase hierarchy and a revelation.

Byrne is an evangelist for the betterment of the country, for staying and fighting, for dragging uncomfortable white people along in the project instead of capitulating to know-nothing, do-nothing intransigence. Maybe that’s why American Utopia carries the energy of a religious revival.

Nevertheless, I later found myself doubting my own feelings and wondered if I’d allowed myself to become a Pollyanna for a few hours because it felt good. I was haunted by something Zamalin said about the complexities of black utopias.

“What’s really striking about the black utopian tradition is that they’re really aware of how fragile any kind of revolutionary or idealistic exercise or adventure is, because at each historical moment of the writing, they’re so attuned to the inequality in white supremacy that their visions are viewed with a kind of sense of the tragic,” Zamalin said. “They know that they need to dream in order to come up with an alternative, but even those dreams are filled with much more skepticism and much more internal awareness and critique than white utopian thinkers, who believe that all that’s necessary is to just articulate a bold vision and people will get on board.”

I wanted to take the world I’d witnessed on stage and make it real instead of resigning myself to racialized anger and heartbreak, occasionally interrupted by short-lived bursts of black euphoria.

Isn’t that what we do with our home? We stay, we fight to make it more perfect. In the days that followed, I wondered if I was being selfish, if what I wanted was simply impossible. It’s what made this essay so difficult to write; the more I learned, the more I read, the less sure I was about anything.

But for a moment in October when I stepped onto 44th Street, space didn’t have to be the place. Instead, I could acknowledge that home is where I want to be. And furthermore, I’m already here.

LINER NOTES

Further reading: 

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Creating the Black Utopia of Buxton, Iowa by Rachelle Chase

Making a Way Out of No Way, A Womanist Theology by Monica A. Coleman

Blake; or, The Huts of America by Martin Robison Delany

The Condition Elevation Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States by Martin Robison Delany

Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delaney

The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton

Utopia/Dystopia edited by Peyton E. Richter

Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers by Ruby Rohrlich

The Annotated African American Folktales edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar

Black Utopia: The History of an Idea From Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism by Alex Zamalin

Further listening:

American Utopia

Dirty Computer

Homecoming

Space is the Place: Music for the Film

Forget plausible. Is it defensible?

It can’t be flippant. It can’t be casual, and it can’t be all about the white people.

Two of off-Broadway’s most unconventional playwrights opened shows this season that feature black characters voluntarily engaging in situations that require them to be enslaved: Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play and Suzan-Lori Parks’ White Noise.

If one were to compile a list of Things Black People Do Not Care to Resurrect, the institution of slavery would be at the top by unanimous decision. The instinct to reach for pitchforks is understandable, but hold off for a moment. If having modern black characters enter into slavery or recreations of it is going to be a thing, it might be best to establish some guidelines. Not rules, which only invite themselves to be broken, but some best practices.

Slave Play enjoyed a much buzzed-about run at New York Theatre Workshop (Madonna came!) before it closed in January. The plot revolves around three black characters, all in interracial relationships, who invite their white partners to a Virginia plantation for something called Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy. The couples have reached psychosexual impasses in their relationships, and they are all seeking a way back to having good, enjoyable sex. Harris, the creator of this scenario, is a 29-year-old graduate student at Yale School of Drama.

White Noise is the product of a 55-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner and is running at the Public Theater through May 5. In it, Leo (Daveed Diggs) is a black artist who asks his white friend, Ralph (Thomas Sadoski), to buy him for a period of 40 days and 40 nights for $89,000, the amount it will take to pay off his credit card and student loan debt. Each man is in a relationship: Leo is with a white woman named Dawn (Zoë Winters) and Ralph has a black girlfriend named Misha (Sheria Irving).

Both plays follow white characters as they submit to the seduction of white supremacy and finally admit that they’re not necessarily the Good White People they believe themselves to be.

The imagery required by such a thought experiment is deeply disturbing, of course. That’s the point.

Slave Play includes a scene in which a black woman named Kaneisha is ordered to eat fruit off the ground at the behest of her white overseer/boyfriend. In White Noise, Leo is placed upon a desk that functions as an auction block while wearing an iron collar designed to snag on trees and branches and break the wearer’s neck should he or she run away. Ralph forces him to wear a T-shirt that reads “SLAVE.”

The night I saw White Noise, there were audible gasps of horror when Diggs-as-Leo entered the stage with the collar around his neck. It wasn’t just the presence of an iron torture device that inspired such reaction. It was Leo’s body language. His shoulders slumped. The light had disappeared from his eyes. He was enveloped in a cloud of shame and resignation. In that moment, I could not see Leo. I could only see Daveed Diggs, and it was beyond awful.

I wanted to vomit.

Forget plausible. In what world, imagined or otherwise, was this level of degradation useful, much less defensible?

I couldn’t be fully present for the remainder of the show. Instead, I started wondering how Diggs was managing to play this role for eight performances a week. I checked my phone to see how much more of Leo’s enslavement we’d have to endure. I squirmed in my seat and I seethed, waiting for the play to end.

Is it even possible to suspend disbelief to accept “modern black person voluntarily enters slavery” as a plausible (if absurd) plot point? How do we determine where the proverbial line is?

Its location depends upon a number of factors. It’s helpful to think about the use of slavery in storytelling the way we do with other topics that audiences can find repellent, such as sexual violence.

In recent years, plenty of critics have written about the way sexual assault is deployed in film and television, especially because both mediums are dominated by male writers and directors and much of the sexual violence that happens to female characters happens without much thought, or as motivation for the vengeful actions of another male character. It’s gratuitous.

In 2016, there was a tense exchange between HBO’s head of programming and members of the Television Critics Association, who were challenging the network’s reliance on rape as a plot device in The Night Of and Westworld. In 2015, after a disturbing episode of Game of Thrones aired in which Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) was raped by her husband on their wedding night, Washington Post critic Alyssa Rosenberg offered some clarity on how to think about the way sexual violence is deployed in storytelling. “I think it’s important to preserve the distinction between saying that something simply isn’t for me and drawing a more definitive conclusion that something is a poor artistic choice,” she wrote. “You can assert the former, but you have to argue the latter, using the text and the language of the artistic form at hand.”

So when it comes to Slave Play and White Noise, which are both risky, wire-walking productions, how do we know when the choice to have black characters willingly enter enslavement is simply personally distasteful and when it’s a poor artistic choice?

Well, it can’t be flippant. And it can’t be casual.

The first two points are easy enough to understand. The likelihood that a show will be terrible if it treats the choice to become a slave with the same consideration that one might give to forgoing flossing is 99.9 percent. It’s not an exact comparison, but see: the uproar when Russell Simmons released a “Harriet Tubman sex tape” under the auspices of parody. There are ways to make excellent jokes about the most repugnant of topics (hello, The Producers!), but it’s not easy.

In White Noise, Leo, an insomniac, has a contract drawn up that lays out the terms of the enslaved engagement after he’s attacked by police while walking in his neighborhood one night. Leo comes out of the incident with a badly bruised face, a broken tooth and a desire for one of his oldest friends to own him. As Leo puts it:

“Back in the day, a guy like me would be walking wherever and he’d get stopped by the Law, some law enforcement individual, and there would be a ‘Whose n—– are you, n—–?’ moment and the guy like me would be like, ‘I belong to Master So-And-So,’ and the Law would be like, ‘Oh, if you’re Master So-And-So’s property, then you’re cool with us, so go ahead on with your black self’ and a guy like me would go on,” Leo explains. “ ’Cause he was owned by somebody. ’Cause the brother was the property of the man. He was safe ’cause he was a slave.”

Both White Noise and Slave Play are deeply considered works, not intellectual clickbait. Slave Play especially understands the need for an off-ramp if audiences are to follow its characters to such a dark place. It even includes a safe word: “Starbucks!” Furthermore, Slave Play is based in a real kink that exists in the world of bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism. It’s strange, but it’s not unthinkable.

The journey to urban plantation life in White Noise feels a little more undercooked. Black men get harassed and beaten up by the police with such frequency in this country that black parents prepare their children for it. Using a violent encounter with police as Leo’s motivation does seem rather flippant or, at the very least, not all that well-considered. It certainly invites a question: Given how often these interactions take place, why aren’t other desperate black men offering themselves up for further abuse and unpaid labor? The answer is obvious, and the idea collapses in on itself before we’re halfway through the play.

The third guideline for putting voluntary slavery on stage — it can’t be all about the white people — is the trickiest.

Parks recently participated in a discussion about White Noise in New York with Oskar Eustis, the show’s director and the artistic director of the Public Theater, and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Parks said she has a rule for her approach to writing characters: “Everyone gets to ride the bus. … No one gets thrown under the bus.”

Parks added: “I love each of these characters, and I understand each of their points of view.”

I wanted to scream. When the person on the bus is a rapist, or a slave owner, or a Nazi, and an enthusiastic one at that, it’s OK to throw them under the damn bus. It is possible to write a play about race and racism that manages to successfully keep all its characters aboard the bus without capitulating to whiteness (The Niceties is an example), but it’s not as straightforward as understanding the white ones.

If only White Noise reflected the love that Parks proclaims for each of her characters. Of the four main roles, Ralph, the sole white man, is the most clearly developed, to a stunning degree. His motivations are the most clearly articulated, and his grievances genuine. Parks sends him down a rabbit hole of white supremacy so deep that by Day 28 of his jaunt into slave ownership Ralph joins a “White Club” and then brags to his White Club friends that he has his own personal slave. Ralph’s storyline cuts off the development of all the other characters in White Noise.

I had a better understanding of the show’s weaknesses after I heard Eustis say he wanted to keep the audience on Ralph’s side for as long as possible. Again, I found myself stifling the urge to scream.

Why!?! Why is there a need to keep the audience on Ralph’s side at all? Everything, from the Constitution (as playwright and actress Heidi Schreck thoughtfully illustrates in What the Constitution Means to Me) to the Supreme Court to virtually every instrument of power in the history of this country is on Ralph’s side. To quote Peggy Olson in Mad Men: “You have everything, and so much of it.”

To conduct a successful thought experiment about a black person volunteering for slavery, it’s paramount to acknowledge this imbalance and to resist the deep gravitational pull of white narcissism, which devours injustice toward black people and spits out white injury. (Ralph finds that slaveholding soothes his wounded ego after he’s passed over for a tenured professorship in favor of a person of color.)

It’s a stage version of “All Lives Matter”: What starts out as a story about how white supremacy affects a black person (Leo) becomes subsumed by talk about how white people feel and how they’re being victimized. There’s no room to center the voice of the person who the terrible thing actually happened to. And that’s not enough to justify the humiliation of trotting out some lost brotha, who doesn’t feel remotely believable, in an iron collar.

Parks concludes White Noise with Leo the insomniac shouting, “I’m awake. I’m awake.” But she never establishes how he managed to be asleep for so long in the first place.

Lest you think this sort of well-intentioned clumsiness is unique to stories about American racism, I assure you it is not. In her 2018 film When Hands Touch, writer-director Amma Asante somehow managed to All Lives Matter the Holocaust with a story in which a black German girl falls in love with an actual Nazi.

By contrast, even though the white characters of Slave Play cannot get past their own solipsism, the play itself does. The black characters go on their own journeys and come to their own realizations independently. And there’s a deeper truth within Slave Play, which is that sometimes nothing, not even placing oneself in the role of a slave owner, will get white people to wake the hell up. Sometimes you just have to take the L and let them go.

Three plays — ‘Fairview,’ ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘Toni Stone’ — highlight how black theater-makers approach audiences who do not look like them

Right before the end of Act I of Toni Stone, a new play about the first woman to play in baseball’s Negro Leagues, its company engages in an extended shuck-and-jive routine.

The nine actors, all wearing the uniform of the Indianapolis Clowns, sport wide, ersatz grins as they leap across the stage, each performing some grotesque trick. One juggles, another high-kicks. The team of court jesters does its best to amuse an imaginary crowd of white baseball spectators, most of whom showed up to see the team’s feigned merrymaking and Bojangling in the outfield.

There was some laughter from the mostly white and mostly older audience at the performance I attended at Roundabout Theatre Company. It simmered into nervous titters as it became clear that the routine the Clowns were performing was demeaning, soul-deadening work. An uncomfortable silence fell over the audience. The stadium lights of the set flashed bright for an instant, then went black.

Stone, played by April Matthis, delivered the last word: “Our people always did have a way of turning what matters into something beautiful that touches the soul. We call that laughter and they call that clowning. But you know they know. They know it’s powerful so’s they come back for more of it. But they also know they can’t do it … never mind catch a pop an’ flip back an’ throw it in for the double play. White people think if it’s fun an’ have a certain elegance, it ain’t serious. But they know. Everyone knows they can’t turn what’s practical into something more, the Charleston Slide, the Mississippi slow grind, or the art of making a skill pretty. So they laugh and give us a little bit of money so they keep laughing, but they know it’s powerful and they know that we know what they doin’ to us while we still steady makin’ em laugh.”

When the play resumed after intermission, one of the Clowns, known as King Tut (Phillip James Brannon), broke the fourth wall to address the audience. King Tut tried to smooth over any tension from the show’s unexpected turn toward the team’s resentment of racist fans by addressing it head-on. “Oh, good,” he said. “Thoughta mighta scared you at the bottom of the first.”

In another instance, Stone turns to reassure the audience before lighting into another teammate, Jimmy, while they are all on the bus together. Here’s how it appears in the script:

TONI

No … I just called him over here to ask him ’bout his mama.

(to audience) I don’t know Jimmy’s mama. We about to play the dozens. (beat) It’s just a game.

The play is a biographical sketch of Stone, focusing mostly on the ways that she’s an outsider within a group of outsiders. Her male teammates in the Negro Leagues, shut out from the opportunity in the majors, have conversations about what makes a black man like Jackie Robinson suitable to break baseball’s color barrier. Meanwhile, Stone is constantly wrestling with the way her gender impacts how she’s received as a ballplayer, along with expectations about her behavior, hair and style of dress and the roles she and her husband (also the Clowns’ manager) occupy once they’re married.

Stone often faces the audience to explain who she is, what she wants and what she loves to set up scenes from her life. There’s a recurring joke to break up these bits: Stone faces the audience and deadpans, “I’m a little girl” during flashbacks when she is, in fact, a little girl.

But what I kept noticing was how much playwright Lydia R. Diamond had fashioned her play with the white gaze in mind. The show actively talks to an audience it correctly assumes will be majority white, and so it is written in a way to explain elements of black culture that may seem foreign.

Once I realized this was a pattern and not just a one-off, the tic became increasingly grating for a couple of reasons:

1) This sort of narrative hand-holding coddles and enables cultural ignorance on the part of the audience.

2) It tells black audience members that even though they’re watching a show that’s about black people, played entirely by black actors and written by a black playwright, the show isn’t interested in acknowledging its black audience or the knowledge of ourselves that we bring to our own stories.

Considerations about the overrepresentation of whiteness in theater audiences are almost unavoidable because it’s built into the experience of consuming theater in a way that, say, it’s not with television. You can see strangers watching alongside you and their reactions.

So, should playwrights and directors acknowledge this in the work? And if so, how? Three plays running in New York this summer — Toni Stone, Much Ado About Nothing and Fairview — help us focus on those questions.

Toni Stone accommodates its white audience unfamiliar with black traditions. Public Theater’s all-black production of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Kenny Leon, was utterly unconcerned with explaining Leon’s vision for Beatrice and Benedick. Either you understood the references or you didn’t. Then there’s Fairview, the play that netted Jackie Sibblies Drury the Pulitzer Prize by not just acknowledging the white gaze but also actively challenging it.

I became exasperated with the racial exposition of Toni Stone, but that’s not to say clever ways of acknowledging the whiteness of theater audiences don’t exist. Take, for instance, Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’, which closed this spring after a run at The Public.

Ain’t No Mo’ starts with a very black funeral taking place in a very black church. It’s Nov. 4, 2008, and within the casket sitting onstage rests not a person but a thing: black people’s right to complain. Or, as the pastor refers to it, “Brother Righttocomplain.”

At one point during an extremely spirited eulogy, Pastor Freeman (Marchánt Davis) begins to lead his congregation in a rather unconventional church shout:

I guess y’all done went to sleep on Pastor Freeman, I-I-I-I-I must be preaching to mySELF this evening cause I ain’t heard a SHOUT yet. I said there ain’t no more tears to be shed because the President is WHAT? Ain’t no more marching in the streets to be heard, because the President is WHAT? Come on and say it, somebody, I can see the spirit doing the Cupid Shuffle in yo chest right now, waiting to rise up and reveal itself as yo true voice. … I want every colored person in this room to turn to yo neighbor and say neighbor … the President is my n—- …… Louder … SAY THE PRESIDENT IS MY N—-.

Pastor Freeman would improvise as he bounced from aisle to aisle, among the theater audience turned congregants. “THE PRESIDENT IS MY N—-,” the good pastor would holler, raising his arms and making eye contact with the black folks in the audience, encouraging them to join in the shouting. Then a white face would appear in his line of sight. “Not you!”

I practically bellowed with laughter.

Admittedly, my gauge for this sort of thing is heavily influenced by my job, my upbringing and my education. I grew up with a black parent and graduated from a historically black university. I write about culture and race for a site that is mostly trafficked by white readers, but they are not the primary audience I’m addressing. There’s a reason for that distinction. Part of it is simply that not everything is about white people. Even the stuff they can see! But the other part is that getting trapped in a perpetual introductory class of Race Theory 101 becomes rather dull rather quickly. Having to repeatedly pause to explain basic concepts about black culture or about racism eats up time and energy I’d prefer to expend elsewhere. The white gaze doesn’t just assume whiteness is the default. It reorients everything to force that fallacy to be true. It’s indicative of a power imbalance that even in art about black folks, accommodating white ignorance is expected. The fact that Hamilton largely refused to do this was one of the things that made it such a revelation.

These pauses that exist solely to enlighten white people who lead racially blinkered lives have been named “explanatory commas” by Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji, the hosts of NPR’s Code Switch podcast. One of the problems with Toni Stone is that its explanatory commas feel retrograde. Frankly, after a season that included work such as BLKS, Ain’t No Mo’, Choir Boy and Leon’s Much Ado About Nothing, all of which are steeped in black culture and not particularly interested in justifying or explaining it, I began to take for granted that black artists could make theater about themselves without having to include a pause for white people to catch up.

Leon’s Much Ado, produced for the Free Shakespeare in the Park series, is hammy and energetic and encourages audience interaction and scene-stealing. It’s a rendering of Shakespeare that pays homage to traveling black stage plays.

Everything about its design, from the giant “STACEY ABRAMS 2020” banners that flank the set to the Morehouse maroon of the actors’ costumes to Camille A. Brown’s choreography, screams bougie black contemporary Atlanta. Yet Shakespeare’s text remained the same. There were no signposts in the dialogue to direct you to the inspirations for Leon’s aesthetic decisions. They simply existed.

The thing I appreciated about the lack of explanatory commas was how it rearranged the power dynamic between artist and patron to something more equitable. What Leon did with Much Ado is move the baseline for cultural literacy in the theater audience. There were things about black life that you’re expected to know because it’s unthinkable that you wouldn’t. And he did it by pairing it with the words of the most universally known and respected playwright in human history: Shakespeare.

Fairview takes a different approach, running head-on at the white gaze, even during its unconventional curtain call. The play challenges the white gaze by making it a part of the show in a way that highlights how such narcissism spills into the consumption of black art.

Fairview starts out as a conventional-seeming work about a black family celebrating its matriarch’s birthday. But lighting and sound changes in the second act reveal to the seated audience that it’s actually witnessing white people watch a play about black people. The second act is a repeat of the first, except the actors are muted while a soundtrack of unseen white people comments about what’s happening in the plot and their own attitudes about race. Finally, the white people physically inject themselves into the story as if they bought tickets to some sort of blackness immersion theme park ride.

Fairview leaves audiences unable to deny the influence of the white gaze and pushes them to question their own complicity in perpetuating it. Toni Stone seems to have succumbed to it. And Leon’s Much Ado ignores it. Here’s to more art that offers up blackness without apology or explanation, expands definitions of cultural literacy and challenges audiences of all stripes to do the reading.

LINER NOTES

Toni Stone is on stage at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre through August 11. Fairview is at Brooklyn’s Theater For a New Audience until July 28.

Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking choreopoem gets a new presentation in New York

About three-quarters of the way through for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the women of Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem recreate the oh-so-common laments of men who just can’t get it together:

lady in blue: that n—– will be back tomorrow, sayin’ ‘i’m sorry’

lady in yellow: get this, last week my ol man came in sayin, ‘i don’t know how she got yr number baby, i’m sorry’

lady in brown: no this one is it, ‘o baby, ya know i waz high, i’m sorry’

lady in purple: ‘i’m only human, and inadequacy is what makes us human, &

if we was perfect we wdnt have nothin to strive for, so you might as well go on and forgive me pretty baby, cause i’m sorry’

lady in green: ‘shut up b—-, i told you i waz sorry’

When actor Okwui Okpokwasili, who plays Lady in Green in the revival of for colored girls at New York’s Public Theater, spat out those last words from an abusive, ungrateful partner, they landed with a slap. She had to direct them at one of her sisters in color, and not some awful boyfriend, but she smiled and made eye contact with her scene partner. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed.

The show went on, and it was a moment, not even necessarily for the audience, that was easily overlooked. And yet it embodied the spirit of sisterhood that dances through this staging of for colored girls, directed by Leah C. Gardiner and choreographed by the Tony-nominated Camille A. Brown, whose work appeared last season in Choir Boy.

Shortly after Shange died at age 70 in October 2018, the Public Theater announced it would revive her most well-known work. for colored girls made its off-Broadway debut there in 1976, before moving uptown to Broadway’s Booth Theatre. With its questions and worries about sexuality, virginity, intimate partner abuse, police violence, cultural appropriation, abortion, trifling romantic partners, and sexual assault, for colored girls remains as relevant now as it was when Shange first began workshopping it in Berkeley, California, in 1974.

for colored girls came into being amid the experimental Black Arts Movement. Other luminaries of the movement, who seemed as though they would live forever, have also taken their leave in recent years — Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka in 2014, and Toni Morrison earlier this year.

The Black Arts Movement both documented and propelled social change, and something similar feels like it’s taking place in New York theater now. It is full of urgent, strange, nervy work that is interrogating whiteness and challenging who holds power in the theater and in society at large. Artists such as Michael R. Jackson, Donja R. Love, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Jeremy O. Harris, Aleshea Harris, Patricia Ione Lloyd, and Jordan E. Cooper have distilled the essence of the movement, leaving its less effective elements consigned to the 1970s, and built off what works.

Brown and Gardiner have brought forth a revival brimming with reverence and fearlessness. Their work isn’t intimidated by Shange’s position within the black canon. Instead, they embrace it, and her, as a sister and contemporary. The direction feels both new and simultaneously lived-in. Because social dance and natural movement play such a big role in Brown’s work, there’s an accessible grace and effortless modernity about this show.

The Public’s revival is staged in the round, in a space that surrounds the audience with hazy, homey mirrors. Lucite installations that resemble wind chimes, like something you might have pulled out of your grandmother’s attic, hang from the ceiling. The performers lounge among the audience when they’re not speaking or dancing.

“Just as Women’s Studies had rooted me to an articulated female heritage & imperative, so dance as explicated by Raymond Sawyer & Ed Mock insisted that everything African, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace, a strut, an arched back over a yawn, waz mine,” Shange wrote in her introduction to the published choreopoem. “I moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of being in a colored woman’s body to my known everydayness.”

Screen adaptations of for colored girls have never quite captured the essence of the choreopoem — its downtown New York theater sensibility and its grungy simplicity, born of a hunger to make art even when one can barely afford the basics to stage it. Oz Scott directed a 1981 adaptation for the American Playhouse series that included Lynn Whitfield and Alfre Woodard and expanded the world of the choreopoem to include men in the production. Tyler Perry’s 2010 feature film, which starred Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Loretta Devine, Tessa Thompson, Kerry Washington, and Whoopi Goldberg, added a similarly unwelcome high-production-value sheen. Even though the show moved to Broadway, Shange maintained that her tastes were simpler. “for colored girls . . . is either too big for my off-off Broadway tastes, or too little for my exaggerated sense of freedom, held over from seven years of improvised poetry readings,” she wrote.

In this new revival, men are present in the words, but not on the stage. The women recount their deeds, the fun they provide, the sorrow they inflict. In between, in the margins of the words and performances, is the love black women hold for each other. This for colored girls offers a metatextual take on how black female queerness often exists in the cracks between the floorboards of our worlds. It doesn’t necessarily show up on the page, but it’s in the dreamy, flirty, sassy dances recreated by the women as they recall vignettes from their lives. In those moments, Shange isn’t just a part of the Black Arts Movement, but incorporated into the literary sisterhood of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place.

In the mirrors of the for colored girls set (designed by Myung Hee Cho), light bounces around the room, but magic does, too. The room buzzes with the love black women offer each other, both romantic and not. If a black woman enters searching for God in herself, she need only look up and around.

LINER NOTES

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf runs at the Public Theater in New York through December 8.