Something Lost in Transit
By Henning Bochert
Translated from German by Goesta Struve-Dencher
The Shipment
By Young Jean Lee
Hebbel Theater
Berlin, Germany
(closed)
As part of a European tour following its extraordinarily
successful run in New York earlier this year, Young Jean Lee's play
The Shipment was recently presented by the HAU Theater in Berlin.
The production, directed by the author and performed at the Hebbel Theater,
had just come from engagements in Paris, and it would subsequently play
in Hamburg.
For my part, I was seriously impressed by the
exacting composition and the profound dramaturgy of this work, as well
as by the marvelous acting in it. At the same time, it struck me that,
despite its obvious ambitiousness and depth, the production did not
read well for a German audience, largely because of the way its provocations
were specifically designed for a U.S. audience.
The Shipment subverts American perceptual
habits. We witness an evening in four parts: an introductory dance;
a solo entertainer performing a massive monologue; a sort of comic-strip
biographical sketch in high-speed time-lapse; and finally a short social
drama with a twist. After the New York opening, a reviewer for The
New York Times wrote: "The show is provocative but never polemical,
and it is pleasingly eclectic." Here I would like to offer my response
as a German spectator who necessarily has different reactions to both
the provocations and the pleasures.
While I did not feel significantly affected emotionally
after the show, the evening appears more complex as I think about it
more closely. I also perceived a fundamental question -- and a fundamental
problem -- in exporting this work to non-American countries. The performance
aims at undermining the audience's deeply ingrained prejudicial modes
of seeing. Each of the four parts addresses discriminatory perceptions,
of which no one can be free, and it is the necessary labor of a meaningful
Sisyphus to point them out time and again. The problem with performing
such a labor beyond the borders of one's culture is that perceptions
of discriminatory perceptions are necessarily very different there.
Anyone expecting a dialogue-based play focusing
on racism is unsettled right off the bat in The Shipment by
the virtuosic opening dance. The choreography quotes elements of the
minstrel-show, a specifically American form of entertainment that began
in the 19th century and remained popular until the final abolition of
the Jim Crow laws in 1964: white entertainers painted their faces black
and danced a caricature of black people and their alleged ridiculous
characteristics. Not even the music in these shows was really of African-American
origin. Yet paradoxically, black actors eventually participated in them.
The exploitative minstrel shows provided a loophole in the performing
restrictions for black entertainers, and audiences would often not even
notice that the skin under the black paint was actually dark. It is
hard to imagine how humiliating this occupation would have been.
We can assume that a U.S. audience would be as
sensitive to quotations from the minstrel form, even though it is old
history, as a German audience would be to the tone of anti-Jewish forms
of entertainment. Most German audience members do not know much about
minstrelsy, however, and without this essential information, all they
may see is a beautiful dance.
The next part of The Shipment is one
big transgression of racial taboos: the actor Douglas Scott Streater
inundates us with black-and-white jokes in stand-up comedy format. He
speaks of babies slaughtered, incest propagated, and runs the gamut
of scatological language from anal sex to sex with animals. He admits
that he would not talk like this offstage but he's too afraid of his
peers' reactions to abandon his role. During his first sentences, the
actor addresses his audience regarding the ethnic minorities at the
respective site of the performance. Every place has its own blacks,
he opines: it's just that in Berlin they'd be called Turks.
Now, both jokes and taboos are culturally very
delicately positioned and not easily transposed by just briefly calling
upon the most visible ethnic minority at the respective city of performance
in this way: Tamils in Zürich, Turks in Berlin, Arabs in Paris. The
issues involved are too specific in each case, and if Tamils in Switzerland
are differently positioned in society than Turks in Berlin, then there
is certainly a significant difference between both those groups and
African-Americans in the United States. The Turks in Berlin, for example,
are first, second or already third generation immigrants from the post-war
economic boom (Wirtschaftswunder) of the 1960s, when Germany
was in urgent need of workers for its flourishing industry. During that
time, Greeks and Italians were invited to work in Germany as well, as
Gastarbeiter, or guest workers. A comparison with African-Americans
in the U.S., whose ancestors were forcibly relocated as cargo, glosses
over the atrocities of the slave trade and the racial divide embedded
in that country since then. Perhaps this point could be clarified by
reflecting on how specious it would be to equate the particular social
issues facing African-Americans with those of contemporary Mexican immigrant
workers in the U.S.
Young Jean Lee no doubt felt she was directing
her local audiences' attention towards their own racial prejudices and
patterns of thinking. My feeling, however, is that for the purpose of
a differentiated view, the show's specificity is just what should not
be sacrificed. The production is calibrated to a U.S. audience with
the most extreme exactitude. Running the risk of getting caught in the
first net laid out by the dramaturgy, I consider the decision to superimpose
local problems at the tour's performance sites imprecise.
Part three of The Shipment is Omar's
story, an extremely amusing narrative cliché of an underprivileged African-American's
life. We learn of Omar's dream of becoming a rap star, his drug career,
his jail time. A few friends die, and in the end he regrets his ugly
life. The acting here is an impressive translation of the South
Park style to the stage. Obviously the audience gets caught up
in this surprising treatment. But the matter unfortunately isn't left
there. A very long, patronizing silence follows the scene, of the kind
one employs with children, waiting out their tantrums with a patient,
meaningful look. After the show, an actress told me that this was exactly
the way it was meant. It was supposed to make us feel uncomfortable,
and that expectation felt awkward. Eventually, marvelously, the a cappella
trio in the scene broke the silence with a song by Modest Mouse. The
precision of that cut like a knife.
By this point in the play, the audience was clearly
tuned to the theme at hand. As a Caucasian, I would have been too uptight
by now to talk to any Turk, Iranian, Tamil, Algerian, Senegalese or
African-American about what I was seeing. Then came the longest, fourth
part of the show, the main attraction: a birthday party at Thomas's.
This section involves a mini-play about a host who is acting strangely,
pitting his guests against each other. "I have poisoned us all," he
claims, after which everybody becomes frantic and an ambulance is called.
Later it all turns out to be a bad joke. Thomas is so lonely that he
brutally dupes his friends and, along with them, us.
The friends play a game to relax, a few not-so-funny
jokes are made about African-Americans, everyday racism. Omar is not
comfortable with that. "I really don't think we would be doing this
if there were a black person in the room," he says. "I guess that would
depend on what kind of black person it was," quips Desmond. Bang, lights
out. The End.
Now the audience ought to do a double take and
realize, oh wow, those were all white characters being played by the
black cast. I suspect that most of the Berlin audience, however, missed
this twist either for acoustic reasons or because they were busily scanning
back and forth between actors and supertitles. The question remains
whether the U.S. audience would have caught on before the final revelation.
In any case, because the black-white theme is less prevalent in German
society, we tend to perceive (or would like to think we do) social class
before skin color in such a setting, so we may not have the prerequisites
to decipher these racial behavioral stereotypes at all. What we see
are well-situated, very well-dressed people, who act and speak much
like the characters in the TV serials imported from the USA.
This play is a racism mouse-trap, minutely and
magnificently constructed, and it should be no surprise that it ensnares
differently in different places. It was certainly less effective with
a European audience, and under the conditions of a foreign-language
guest performance, than it no doubt was in Columbus, Ohio, or New York
City. I was looking forward to asking about its various subtleties,
and about the cultural differences just described, during a post-show
talk with the cast and Ms. Lee at the Hebbel. Unfortunately, such a
talk was not scheduled. Which was too bad, because this production urgently
required mediation under the circumstances in Berlin. The translation
alone was unable to convey both the fine web of its thematic fabric
and the powerful impact of its delivery.