So why does our theatre remain stuck in its current quasi-nostalgic mindset and an ongoing obsession with South Africa? Perhaps because we use Africa as a proxy for our own genuine, but milder, set of social ills - Boston may have great strides against its racism, but it's still organized in the style of apartheid, with a vast shantytown in Roxbury. (Yes, I know there's an integrated "collegetown," too.) But why doesn't anyone write a play about that? Why has there never been a play about Boston apartheid? Instead we engage with it at one remove via South Africa. Which frankly is a form of virtual cultural colonialism, and of course distances us from the harsh necessity of grappling with our own issues (while assuaging our guilt for not doing so).Anyone got an answer for him?
Friday, January 8, 2010
A Very, Very Good Question...
...from Thomas Garvey, in his review of the Lyric Stage's production of Groundswell:
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16 comments:
Brecht would say that by distancing it, it allows us to look more clearly at the situation. I don't think so. I think, like Thomas says, it lets us off the hook.
Oddly enough, I did write a play about Boston gentrification several years ago: Allston. It didn’t really deal with apartheid so much as how Chinese (and Asian-Americans) families were being pushed out of central Boston by rent hikes caused by college students (whose parents could afford large houses). I mean, granted, the play wasn’t (isn’t) that great and yes, this comment is kind of grossly self-promotional (though, not really; I’m not interested in seeking a new production for it). But I just figured since you asked, I’d bring it up.
I think the other interesting question that Thom posed was also why so few of these plays about injustice in Africa address violence and tyranny unrelated to the Apartheid regime: i.e ethnic cleansing, mass murder between political factions, or rape and murder of lesbian and gay Africans.
Yes, there is J.T. Rogers' The Overwhelming, but there is much about it that was disingenuous (I also happened to write a review.)
It seems to me that if one is going to use Apartheid as an allegory for American racial oppression, the better parallel is Jim Crow since both were unapologetic in their all-pervasive threat of brutality against anyone who crossed the line: you can use Jim Crow as an allegory for our current situation since it's an antecedent-- but Apartheid as an allegory for contemporary America is a bit too tenuous and really comes across as a means by which those with good liberal sentiment can pat themselves on the back, those on the far-left can ignore all contrasts and say "it still is just like Apartheid", and those on the right can complain about the leftist-bias of American theatre.
Talking about those other affronts to humanity though, might make people of all political stripes uncomfortable.
For instance, it horrifies me as someone who considers himself to be "of the left" that some of the most vocal deniers and apologists for the genocide in Darfur are affiliated with the left.
I definitely agree that there are many, many other stories about Africa being left out, and that Darfur is underreported and dealt with (and the situation in Uganda is horrific and will hopefully start cropping up soon), but I think it's a question to be posed to artistic directors and literary managers first. I can't believe that there are no plays out there about these things, particularly no plays from Sudan by Sudanese writers. But South African plays seem to come first. The only plays I have seen or heard about that deal with Darfur were written by Americans. I wonder what Africans think about Africa.
@Ian... I'm not sure i buy the all-american-plays-about-africa-are-about-apartheid thing. I can't, in fact, think of a recent American play about africa that IS about Apartheid. The Overwhelming? Not about apartheid. Ruined? Not about apartheid. In The Continuum? Not about apartheid. Eclipsed? Not about apartheid. Etc.
What we DO see are a lot of remounts of old plays (not necessarily American) about apartheid, which is another way of saying most of the plays about Africa performed in the United States are written by Athol Fugard. I like Fugard, but man I wish we did more Wole Soyinka plays or maybe a Ken Saro-Wiwa play or two.
As to the central question... I think if you took away that distance and did a play about American racism, say an American version of "master harold..." or whatever, most people would shake their heads and cluck their tongues and say so sensibly (So sensibly!) that the play was pretty good but alas, allowed politics to overshadow its narrative and aesthetic concerns. In other words, I'm not sure we actually want to see those plays even as we claim to want to see those plays. And if those plays were written by someone outside of the community they were portraying, then people would get really insulted... even if they were telling the truth.
I'm not making excuses and I don't think the above is a good thing, it's just what I assume would happen and what keeps people away from doing it more.
Isaac-
My comment should only be read as a reflection on Thom's comments that 99 was quoting.
As far as The Overwhelming, I found that particular play to have some serious shortcomings in how it addressed the Rwandan Genocide (as in that it was factually inaccurate in all but the broadest strokes) as well as with regards to its narrative (I linked to the review I wrote in my earlier post.)
I haven't seen any of Wole Soyinka's plays, but I enjoy his poetry.
Regardless of the quality of the Overwhelming (which I have not seen) the fact remains that the idea that American plays about Africa are overwhelmingly about South African apartheid is inaccurate. That's all I was saying. A bad play not about South African apartheid is still a play not about South African Apartheid.
This, however, is a side-track from the actual point of the question.
I think Thomas Garvey should write that play.
"The Overwhelming" still feels like an apartheid play because it essentially deals with the Rwandan genocide through the POV of a visiting white family. "In the Continuum," "Ruined" and "Eclipsed" are indeed actually afro-centric (if that's a word), but of these only "In the Continuum" has reached Boston.
The Overwhelming felt like a play that would have been far better without the visiting American family (and just as a point of correction, one member of the family is black.)
Look, I don't want to get into a purely semantic argument over penny-ante bullshit, but The Overwhelming isn't about apartheid at all. What you then mean is not "apartheid play" but rather a play about Africa told through a white protagonist and what you yearn for is more afro-centric African plays.
We're in agreement there, and I think the questions you ask are good, but that doesn't stop The Overwhelming from having nothing to do with apartheid.
I will also say that I think perhaps there are more plays that look at structural racism in America than we think, because they try to funnel this look into the human condition and how it is affected by structural racism.
Most recently in New York was Inked Baby which is a really bad play (or rather, a quite interesting Sci-Fi thriller drowning in a quite normal and thoroughly mediocre Playwrights Horizons play) but at least sought to look at issues of environmental racism through an interesting lens.
I said "The Overwhelming" felt like an apartheid play because it still pictured African issues through a white lens (even though, yes, one member of the central family was black). The script kept hinting that if only whites - or at least Americans - had better understood the ethnic hatreds in Rwanda, the genocide might have been prevented. I don't really buy that thesis. At any rate, the thrust of my article was really that I wished I saw more plays that treated Africa honestly, in an up-to-the-minute fashion (which implies, yes, criticizing Africans for many of their own problems). As for those plays dealing with white racism, I said they'd be more compelling if they dealt with U.S., or even local, issues, like Boston's unspoken acceptance of Roxbury as a shunned, substandard black shantytown, with low city services and high crime and poverty rates. I stand by those two points.
As sort of a point of history, if the US government had indeed understood the nature of the genocide in Rwanda, it might have been averted. But, really, that's neither here nor there.
I do honestly think that you raise good points, but the answer is, you know, go out and find those plays. They're out there, they're being written. Or commission them. I don't think it's a failure in the imagination of playwrights as much as it's a failure in the imagination of producers. I find it a bit ironic that, after all of the diversity talk, you've hit on a problem could be solved by...a focus on diversity.
if the US government had indeed understood the nature of the genocide in Rwanda, it might have been averted.
Still, this leads to one of my problems with The Overwhelming which is that it inconveniently takes place in 1994 when the international community, represented by the U.N., had already been watching idly as ethnic cleansing had been going on for a couple of years in Bosnia, despite the media attention.
(It took years of lobbying by the Clinton Adminstration to get U.S. allies on board with "doing something.")
The idea that any of the non-Rwandan "experts" in the play could be ignorant of the political inertia of the times struck me as contrived.
For various reasons, I would much rather not get into a conversation comparing the responses to the situations in Bosnia and Rwanda. Please, let's don't, so we can keep this all nice and civil. I don't know the play, so I can't speak to it. Let's just leave it at that.
Once again, just for the record, I am not a producer, I am a critic.
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