ACT I
Scene 1
Modern theatre began with Constantin Stanislavski’s discovery of his principles of acting that let actors produce realistic human behavior onstage consistently. That let the audience empathize with the characters, which elevated the art of theatre to a new level.
I wish that could be the end of my story of modern theatre, but unfortunately it’s not.
In 2020 a lot of my Colleagues Of Color drew attention to how misrepresented and under represented minorities are in the theatre industry. Their online petition is called We See You White American Theatre.
But that’s not an artistic failure. That’s a management failure. It’s not that the founding concepts of modern theatre leave some groups of people out. People are only being left out because the principles of modern theatre aren’t being applied broadly enough.
The easiest, and often most cost effective way to attract a large audience and sell a lot of tickets is to put on plays a lot of people with money want to watch. That usually means attracting wealthy old White people by putting on plays they want to watch.
Scene 2
Now think about what that means for artists.
If you work in theatre and theatres are operated to sell as many tickets as possible, you end up making career decisions that fit that work environment.
If you’re a hair and makeup artist, and you know that theatre managers sell tickets by putting on plays by White playwrights about White people, and that means that 95% of the actors you’re going to work with are going to be White, which kinds of hair should you learn how to style?
If you and 10 other people apply for a job, who’s going to get it? If you spend 50% of your time and effort learning to style White people’s hair and 50% learning to style Black people’s hair, will that make you the best candidate for jobs where you’re going to be styling White people’s hair 95% of the time?
Actors’ careers depend on them looking good onstage. Not just to help them get future jobs, but also to make them feel like they’re having a good day at work from one day to the next.
So how many Black people would pursue careers as actors if they already know that 95% of the time all the White actors on stage with them will have better looking hair and makeup than they will?
And if so few Black people want to spend their careers dealing with problems like those that only 5% of actors are Black, how does anyone hear enough about Black theatre that theatre managers would be able to sell a lot of tickets to plays by Black playwrights about Black people?
What can we do to cycles like these to break out of them?
ACT II
Scene 1
If you go to a high school that has many Black students in it, there’s probably a Black table in your cafeteria. Why do you think that is?
Well look around your cafeteria again. There’s also an athletes’ table, a preppie table, a math-science-and-computers table, an artist table, a wood-and-metal shop table, and I’m sure you can name some others. Why do things like that happen?
Because it’s fun to hang out with people you have things in common with. Because it’s easier to be friends with people when you know you feel the same way about things that are important to you.
Scene 2
Now think about our tribal origins.
In a tribe of 150 people, life is pretty simple. You produce your own food, you work together for your mutual interests, and you get to know everyone your own age. Many of them are your cousins.
Now here you are today, going to a high school with 500 or 1000 other people.
You don’t have time to be friends with all of them. You’re not even friends of friends with all of them.
You don’t have to hunt and gather your food every day. You can buy your food from the store, or get your lunch from the cafeteria.
So you have a lot more people to choose from to be friends with, and your mutual interests are a lot more abstract. But you’re still trying to make friends with other people based on mutual interests. And so is everyone else.
You’re all still looking for your tribe.
Scene 3
So how did Black turn into a clique? How did Black turn into enough of a mutual interest that it has tables in school cafeterias all over America?
It’s easiest to be friends with people who feel the same way you do about important things.
How do you feel about American history? When you read your history books and you get to 1619, how do you feel about what happens next?
If you’re Black, every time you see a photo of an enslaved person in a history book, you know there’s only one difference between you and that person. They were born in the time and place they were, and you were born in the time and place you were. The laws that made people slaves were so arbitrary, if you’d been born in a slave state in the 17th, 18th, or first two thirds of the 19th century, they’d’ve applied to you too.
White people don’t have feelings like those. Because those arbitrary laws would never have applied to us. We don’t have the same feelings about the arbitrary things that happened to Black people after 1865 either, because those things wouldn’t’ve applied to us.
That means we also don’t have feelings about the things we and our families and our ancestors have done to make lives for ourselves in spite of those arbitrary laws.
Scene 4
Things like this are the reason we need a story of Being Human on Planet Earth that puts us all on the same starting point. The same things that made some people be born in Europe 600 years ago made other people be born in Africa, and other people be born in North America, and other people be born in Asia, and so on for all the continents and islands in the world.
It’s easiest to relate to other people on an emotional level. But when that doesn’t work, we need a backup plan. And modern theatre is built on that backup plan. Our emotions are essentially infinite, but our motivations are relatively few.
ACT III
Scene 1
Here’s an experiment you can try.
Ask your school librarian why people in Nazi Germany would’ve felt that burning books was a good idea.
A librarian can’t really answer that question. Librarians don’t have feelings that make them want to destroy books. So there’s no way for them to talk about the feelings of people who do want to destroy books by relating them to their own feelings.
There’s no way for a librarian to imagine how her feelings of wanting to spend all her time at work organizing books so other people can find them and read them could lead her to wanting to destroy books so no one could read them. So however she describes the feelings of people who destroy books, it’s going to sound abstract, vague, and incomplete. She might know a lot of information about people destroying books, but she obviously doesn’t relate to it personally.
Scene 2
Now here’s another experiment you can try.
Go sit at the table of another clique and start talking to people about the mutual interests of your clique.
What the people at the other table have to say about it is going to sound the same way. Whatever they say is going to sound abstract, vague, and incomplete to you. No matter how much information they have about whatever your clique cares about, they obviously aren’t going to relate to it personally the way you and your friends do.
Now try talking about the mutual interests of their clique. You’ll sound the same way to them.
That’s what happens whenever people try to extrapolate from their own emotions to someone else’s emotions. Something important gets lost.
But if you can tell your own story by building up enough background to show why you feel the way you do about things that affect you, and how things like those have come together over the course of your life, now you are telling your story in a way that other people can start to relate to.
That’s what happens when Black directors direct plays written by Black playwrights about Black people. Or when a director from any group directs a play by someone from that group about that group.
ACT IV
Scene 1
Two Trains Running, by August Wilson, is a play about Black people doing Black things.
What does that mean?
Well that’s the whole point. It’s almost nothing.
But it isn’t nothing. And that not quite nothing turns out to be critical.
The play is set in a diner in Pittsburgh, in 1969. Risa is a waitress. Memphis is the diner owner. Hambone is a mentally ill homeless guy who lives in the neighborhood. Sterling is a guy who just got out of prison.
The city government is trying to use eminent domain to force Memphis to sell the diner, but they’re only offering him about half of what he wants for it. It looks like they’re going to get away with it.
All of these exciting things happen to the characters, but they mostly happen off stage. What you see in the play is mainly what happens when these people hang out and talk to each other on an ordinary day. When an ordinary day for them means poverty, untreated mental illness, prison, being cheated out of their life’s work, and everything else the Civil Rights Movement was about.
Scene 2
The play starts pretty simply. You see Risa, Memphis, and Wolf, one of their regular customers, on an ordinary day in the diner.
The way they talk makes them sound like any Black waitress or diner owner or regular diner customer you might meet on an ordinary day. But you’re not in the play with them. The only people in the play with them are other Black people.
If you’re not Black, the play is a window into Black space. What you see on stage is the kinds of things Black people say and how they say them when they’re talking to other Black people and no one else is listening. The few words you hear when you talk to a Black waitress, or even the many words you hear when you listen to Black musicians or comedians, are just the beginning of a conversation that you don’t hear the rest of.
How people feel and how they talk is always a reaction to things that have happened to them, and an attempt to move their lives in the best direction they can see a way to go from where they are right now.
When you talk to people who feel the same way you do because similar things have happened to them, the conversation goes in a much different direction than when you talk to people who don’t feel the same way you do because similar things haven’t happened to them. That’s why you talk differently to your grandmother than you do to your friends.
The few words you hear when you go to a restaurant and get a Black waitress, and the body language and tones of voice she uses that make you feel that’s how Black people talk, are the opening words in a conversation that could go in a much different direction if you were Black too and no one else was around.
Scene 3
The play puts the words and the tones of voice that make people sound Black when they talk into a context that makes them sound like ordinary people talking.
People try to be hopeful and find ways to improve their situations, but sometimes they get discouraged.
People try to feel good about their lives, but sometimes the things they do to try to feel good are no match for the things that go wrong for them.
Other times those little things are signs of resilience, because even though they seem like small things compared to what’s going wrong for the person, they’re steps along a path to making things better in the long run.
Sometimes you cheer up the people around you.
Other times other people cheer you up.
Sometimes funny things happen and you laugh about them.
Sometimes things go so wrong for you there just is no good way forward, and you have to pick the best of the bad options available to you.
Scene 4
If you sit near a Black table in the cafeteria and listen in, this is what you’ll hear. If you sit near the table for any other clique this is what you’ll hear. People will say things they wouldn’t say to you, or say them in ways they wouldn’t say them to you.
When people say things that don’t make any sense to you, or that sound dumb to you, other people react positively to it. Because they get what the person meant in a way that you wouldn’t, because of something they have in common.
This play was that for the Black table. But it also filled in a lot of the context of things that affected people.
Scene 5
If you are Black, a play about Black people doing Black things means it’s a play that represents Black people onstage realistically. Instead of them being Black people fit into a story by White people about White people.
The characters in this play aren’t servants or slaves or runaway slaves or Civil Rights protesters or athletes or entertainers or tokens or sidekicks or costars or mysterious wise people or people with magical powers. As they say in We See You White American Theatre, there’s more to Black people than their bodies and their trauma.
That’s what this play is about. Even though racism affects each of the characters directly in different ways, it’s not the only thing that happens in the play. The play is about what they do even though a lot of big things go wrong for them.
In other words, a play that shows what characters do in their settings is just an ordinary play.
ACT V
Scene 1
This is the kind of thing that makes life complicated.
How can you and I really talk about our feelings when many of your most profound feelings are about things that are fundamental to the life you live, and many of my most profound feelings are about things that are fundamental to the life I live?
I haven’t lived your life, and you haven’t lived my life. I didn’t grow up in your family and you didn’t grow up in my family. I didn’t grow up in your neighborhood and you didn’t grow up in my neighborhood.
My feelings about growing up in my neighborhood might be similar toyour feelings about growing up in your neighborhood. But what do we do if they’re not?
Scene 2
Theatre gives audiences a window into other people’s lives.
If you learn to be a theatre artist, you learn to create those windows for other people. I’ll do it for you right now…
What themes do you see in Black theatre, or Black art in general, that you don’t see as much of in White theatre or other arts? And how would the differences between Black history and White history make people feel those themes were more important?
Black history is a story of various sets of living conditions that were widespread, that lasted a long time, and that never happened to White people in America. While White people have been busy amassing our generational wealth, Black people have been amassing something else.
Let me put it this way.
If you’re White, is there anything in your family’s history or the history of our country that tells you that emotional strength and endurance, courage, pride, self respect, compassion, a sense of humor, and a sense of community could be extremely important to you personally because good personal qualities might be the only things you ever own and the only things you can pass down to your children?
Black artists tend to produce very powerful art because they tend to be good at bringing together powerful emotions and good and bad human qualities that other people can relate to, but fit them together in ways most people never thought of.
That’s just one way to look at Black history.
Scene 3
America’s adventure through 530 years of racism and counting has probably given us the best experiment yet in the power of theatrical realism.
A play by a Black playwright, with all Black directors, artistic designers, and actors, expresses ideas, feelings, and combinations of those that White people just wouldn’t think of.
But it’s the internal consistency of the characters that tells the story. A character that an audience can relate to and empathize with is a character living a life that the audience can see themselves in, even if they never imagined anyone living a life like that before.
And really, that’s the whole point of theatre.
Scene 4
The pandemic shut down the theatre industry for a year and a half. It’s taking time for us to recover now.
But now that we’re back to theatre companies planning their seasons, I really wish we could agree as an industry to make it People Of Color Year, where we book as many shows as possible that are written, directed, designed, and acted by People of Color.
As an art, as an industry, and as a society we wouldn’t lose anything from it. We’d only gain, by telling powerful stories most people haven’t heard before. And that would be a big step toward rewriting American history to include many of the people who have been written out of our history.
The whole point of realism in modern theatre is that the subconscious communication and empathy that make it possible only depend on the actors getting the audience to relate to the characters.
A character you can relate to is a character you feel makes the same decisions you would in the situations they’re in.
It doesn’t depend on anyone looking like anyone else.
Empathy isn’t a color.
