Last Sunday night, just before the first storm of the season hit, I went to a play reading at the Matrix Theatre on Melrose that launched a new effort to basically change the racial climate of theater. The effort was conceived of well before Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president, but the timing couldn't help but look impeccable. Matrix owner Joe Stern wants to turn his space into a kind of petri dish for plays that explore race and multiculturalism on a regular basis, and in more detail and nuance than they're generally explored. He wants to make the ramifications of color a core theme in American theater as opposed to an exceptional one, because, well, it's time. Long past time. So after three years of talking about it, Stern got his project under way last week with "Stick Fly," Lydia Diamond's play about the modern pressures within and without an upper-middle class black family who meet up at their posh house on Martha's Vineyard for a break of sorts. It's more like a breakdown: the boys have brought their girlfriends home to meet the parents, and the usual tensions--complicated by various racial twists--ensue. Shirley Jo Finney, who directed the acclaimed "Yellowman" a few years back, directed this one.
The show was followed by an audience discussion, led by Finney and Stern, about what they'd just seen and heard. Did they like it, not like it? What worked or didn't? The invitation to discussion was routine for a work in progress like this. But there was a certain eagerness in this case to figure out what not just what people thought about the play, but what they thought about race in general and how creatively and honestly it was represented tonight. Those are big questions that are too big to put on a single work, but that's where things are. That's why Stern is doing what he's doing, to expand the range of works about race and ethnicity that can collectively shoulder the burden of the questions. After all, the entire canon of Shakespeare only begins to answer questions about the nature of love, loyalty, violence and lots of things inbetween. Race in America is an equally capacious theme that deserves to plumbed regularly, like love and death. It deserves center stage.
In the dawn of the age of Obama, we at least seem to be more willing to plumb. One of the more interesting audience remarks about "Stick Fly" came from a young Latino man from South Central who confessed that he felt that black identity was still a murky thing to most people; he was talking not simply about skin color or blood mixtures, but the whole zeitgeist that goes along with being black. What are the expectations, the historical resonance, the orientation to the rest of the world? What does it mean? I thought that took some courage to say, especially in the presence of so many black audience members who were clearly pondering the zeitgeist question themselves. For their part, they each described pieces of their life experience that correlated with the play, or didn't. By the end of the evening, I felt like I'd experienced something pulled by the gravity of unity, not dissent. To cop a cliché, it was all good. Even the dissent. Really.
The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user el floz. It was used under Creative Commons license.
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