Close Encounters:
My Blacks Story
By Una Chaudhuri
The Blacks
By Jean Genet
East 13th Street Theatre
136 East 13th Street (at Third Avenue)
Mar. 11th - Apr. 6th, 2003
Ticktets: (212) 206-1515
On the night I saw The Blacks, fifteen minutes into the performance
two spectators grabbed up their coats and purses and rushed out of the
theatre. Okay: they were white. Okay: they were women. Ten
minutes later, two others (Okay, okay: whites, women) got up
and began to move towards the exit. This time a couple of the cast members
confronted them, asked them if they were leaving. “Yes,”
they said, loudly enough that all the rest of us could hear: “This
is very upsetting to us.” They rushed out. We heard later that
one of them was sobbing as she ran through the lobby and out into the
night.
“Upsetting” would be one way to put it. Another way would
be to note that this production of Jean Genet’s great play by
The Classical Theatre of Harlem forces its audience to think in terms
of race and color. Or rather, it forces them to recognize how much those
categories remain a factor in social perceptions, no matter how much
everyone might hope otherwise. It insists we drop the comfortable pretence
of color-blindness that characterizes middle-class life in America today,
and admit that we do notice color (and gender), all the
time, and that this “noticing” has vastly different
implications for and impacts on different groups.
But the real accomplishment of this production is not in whatever salutary
political insights it may foster. Rather it is in the way it reenlists
the theatre—I mean, the entire theatrical “apparatus,”
as Brecht called it—in cultural politics. It deploys the elements
of performance—gestures, stillness, sounds, silence, gazes, distance,
proximities—in such a way as to make of the theatre a vivid habitation,
a place in which you can’t help knowing and being yourself. That’s
more than upsetting. It’s terrifying. At first you want to run
out. Maybe you do run out. But if you stay, you experience something
unusually specific. Talk to anyone who’s seen the play and they’ll
start telling you stories about specific things that happened on the
night they saw it. One friend told me how an audience member (Okay,
white) had tried to flummox an aggressive performer (Okay,
black) during the pre-show by speaking to her in Spanish. The actor
replied in Spanish, didn’t miss a beat. Another friend (Okay,
white) told me how an actor took her cell-phone off her, star-six-nined
her last caller and berated him at length, to the astonished delight
of the audience.
The “site-specificity” achieved by this production makes
the theatre a social laboratory, a place of discovery, perhaps even
revelation. It forces you to notice the myriad details of behavior and
appearance of those in the space with you: Who are they? How are they
reacting to all this? What have they lived through in their lives that
these actors are now reminding them of? How will they—the spectators,
the actors—end up feeling about race at the end of this play?
How will this little boy (Okay, black) sitting next to me be
affected by this as he grows up, how will it shape his view of whites?
Will the fact that he is so affectionately greeted by the cast offset
his exposure to such a heightened, almost mythic enactment of racial
conflict? How do I feel about being regarded simply as “non-white?”
(“Are you white?” an actor asks me during the pre-show.
When I say no, she moves on to my friends (Okay, they’re white)
and gives them white roses while performing a grotesque parody of subservience.
How do I feel about not being included in the multi-culti version of
Blackness that a part of the audience gets to perform toward the end
of the play? (Okay, I know how I feel: like I did during the O.J.
thing, when every poll reported the opinions of blacks and whites, leaving
the rest of us feeling liked chopped liver). The inner monologue
that begins during the show goes on long after I leave the theatre.
It is the first and fundamental triumph of this production to liberate
the play from the political abstraction in which Genet’s ritualistic
theatricality and extravagant poetry have tended to encase it. Genet’s
daring meditation on the poetics of racial hatred is transformed, here,
into a courageous encounter with the social nuts and bolts of the machine
of racism, which runs as efficiently today as it did half a century
ago when Genet wrote the play for an amateur company of black actors.
Dispiriting—even maddening—as such persistence is, there
is a measure of progress in discovering, as this production does, that
we are now ready for a theatrical mimesis that might work to inoculate
us against the Manichean logic of “black or white,” “us
and them” that fuels that machine. Confronting that logic by rigorously
embodying it, not only within the play but also within the theatre,
The Blacks promises a disruption of its power.
Just such a disruption always lay beneath Genet’s art of transfiguring
transgressions and sacred profanities. But this production takes Genet’s
paradoxes and locates them not only, as he did, on a richly rhetorical
and ritualistic stage, but also within a firmly situated and
painfully localized space, the specific place and time of the
performance. While fully realizing the baroque spectacle implied in
Genet’s text, this production makes that spectacle secondary to
its interaction with the audience. Thus Ann Lommel’s gorgeous
circus set and Kimberly Glennon’s stunning costumes, both in an
uncompromising palette of black and white, are deeply expressive without
in any way reducing—by aestheticizing—the tension and, at
times, even anguish, of the moment-to-moment encounter between the cast
and the spectators.
The Blacks makes the most effective use of environmental staging
that I have seen in a long time, reinvigorating and re-politicizing
it after years of trivialization (think The Donkey Show). Abandoning
the proscenium staging implied in Genet’s text, it creates an
immersive environment of the kind that Artaud had envisioned, with actors
moving about on ramps that run between and around the spectators, who
are seated on swivel chairs. The change has enormous implications for
the political meaning and effect of the play. The staging envisioned
in Genet’s text placed the two distinct groups in the action—the
“white” court and the black performers—on two levels
of a single stage, framed together within the spectator’s visual
field. Located in this way, the two groups constituted a constant structural
reminder of the intractable racial opposition and mystified social hierarchy
that is the play’s subject. The authoritative irony of that static
staging positioned the audience as passive voyeurs of the spectacles
of racism and colonialism. That passivity is vigorously contested in
this production by a constantly shifting dynamic that results from the
complex spatial arrangement of the set. That dynamic inscribes itself
on the spectators’ bodies—craning our necks, swiveling our
chairs, moving to let actors pass among us—as much as it does
on their emotions and imaginations.
Terrifying (or “upsetting”) as this encounter is, its literalness
and physicality make it also deeply rewarding. The real credit for that
unexpected outcome, rests, of course, not with the physical staging
but with the hugely talented cast, who are as successful in unleashing
the power of Genet’s poetry as they are generous and courageous
in how they lead the audience through such politically and emotionally
fraught territory. To discuss only a few of the performances is inevitably
to slight the dazzling ensemble work of such a large cast. Yet a performance
like the one by Ty Jones as Archibald cannot go unacknowledged. The
energy and wit he brings to the role of Genet’s supremely ironic
master of ceremonies is admirable but not unusual: what is absolutely
astonishing is his ability to combine political confrontation with emotional
warmth, threat with playfulness, daunting challenge with thrilling invitation.
All of which is to say, finally, that this is an instance of virtuoso
directing. Christopher McElroen, co-founder and Executive Director of
the Classical Theatre of Harlem, brings great imagination and precision
to this smart updating of Genet’s intricate exploration of racial
performativity. In moving from Genet’s ceremonial formality to
an in-your-face environmentalism, the production implicitly acknowledges
both how much has changed and how much has not changed in the years
since the play was written (1958) and, perhaps more to the point, since
it had its American premiere in 1961. That legendary production ran
for over three years off-Broadway and launched the careers of such actors
as Maya Angelou, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett Jr., James Earl Jones,
and Cicely Tyson. This one, emerging in a radically different cultural
climate—post-civil rights, post-modern, post-political?—has
managed to extend its run and has moved downtown, but is unlikely to
gain the large audiences and long run that it deserves. Especially now,
as war increasingly shoves all legitimate human concerns off the national
agenda, the “poetics” of American racism are unlikely to
get much attention. The Manicheanism that Genet warned of, the virulent
dualism that this production explores, is center stage again: good versus
evil, us or them, do or die. To respond to the horrors of that logic,
one could do worse than go down to 13th Street and join in its theatrical
deconstruction.