BY ADAM M. SCHENCK
It may be the Indian subcontinent that has the caste of untouchables, but it is our American culture that holds untouchable subjects. Chief among them: race. Racism lurks under the surface of campaign slogans like “Make America Great Again” and in the unspoken rules in the TSA lines at the airport.
If the American denial of our racial history comforts us, then facing its reality shocks us. Pillsbury House Theatre’s production aims for this and even more—oddly going so far as to comfort us by facing our own unsettling, shocking history.
The play, written by Christina M. Ham and directed by Marion McClinton, is in two acts. The first is a pulse-pounding reenactment of black-lynching-era rural Arkansas and the second, a view of racism in a contemporary guise.
The stakes are real from the get-go, where racism segregates white from black. In her play, Ham integrates the inherent conflicts of the post-Civil War sharecropping economy to tell a potent story of two solid-as-oak relationships facing the worst possible challenges.
Uly and Ora Gibson (Dan Hopman, Jennifer Blagen), are childless poor whites, and Effie Reynolds and Virgil Hillman (Regina Marie Williams, James A. Williams) are two blacks who sharecrop better land than the Gibsons. Both couples suffer unbearable tragedies: Uly and Ora have multiple stillborn babies and Effie and Virgil’s 25-year-old son is lynched.
I can’t praise the first half enough. It was the best high-tension live theater I can recall observing, ever. Transitions flowed from line to line and scene to scene with brilliance. We see racism’s complexity, and its stubborn refusal to leave the Southern rural economy.
Set design (Dean Holzman) and lighting (Michael Wangen) heighten the tension, visualizing the race relations we so often feel but so seldom acknowledge—one cannot see the peculiarities of one’s own culture: Explain water to a fish.
The first half of the play offers no release of tension, i.e., comedy. The second half, which delivers much comedy but a notable lack of tension, brings our four actors to the present, with the first act’s partners swapped to make for two affluent, interracial couples on a sightseeing vacation through the American South.
Two Ivy League lawyers and a professor plus a New Yorker cartoonist (no, I am not setting up a joke) inhabit our ridiculous present, with its iPhones, faulty email attachments, humongous SUVs with DVD players, fast food, and a panoply of consumer choices.
No, this is not a Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld bit. Our protagonists have stumbled upon the site where Effie and Virgil’s son was lynched “less than a hundred years ago,” as one character puts it, and where the white fear of Virgil’s black sharecroppers union led to a massacre of as many as 200 black men, women and children.
Standing in for the audience, the actors debate two approaches to the American question of race: Is it better to teach our children the awful history of racism (and thereby “see” it all the more but be hamstrung by its terminology), or not speak of racism at all (and thereby activate a form of denial but escape from defining others and oneself as merely a member of a race)?
I found myself completely engrossed in both halves, but I observed the same false assumption in both. The first half would have us believe that the Gibsons and Virgil and Effie struggle with racism if not out of desperation, then out of starvation, since they find themselves so exploited by the landowners. In the second half, by portraying such a privileged sort of people, the play would have us believe that no one goes hungry in today’s United States. Privilege: it’s easy—so easy that an adult white male like me can do it.
The styles of the first and second halves contrast so much that we’re led to think, “Things were so much different then; the tensions must have been worse then.” The characters go from facing murder to facing a lack of kale. Jokes aside, therein lies the false assumption. The year 1919 and today, whether in Arkansas or anywhere, have more in common than we’d like to think.
In our present day Minneapolis we experience the injustice of our police officers killing a young black man without indictment—and not somewhere “out there” in the faraway South in 1919, but in our own community. Additionally, there was plenty of food to go around in 1919, just as there is today; yet, something we cannot name—some kind of force seemingly outside our control—makes some have a lot and the rest have not.
The first half of the play offers a scapegoat in Virgil’s lynched son, and perhaps Virgil, too (he barely escapes the massacre).
The second half has no literal scapegoat; we have to look hard, and look inside ourselves. The comic strip character Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The scapegoat is right here inside ourselves, in our willingness to blame someone—anyone—else. As long as blaming someone else for our problems sounds like a good idea, we’re still with Uly Gibson in 1919. “Make America Great Again” indeed.
The play runs Wednesdays – Saturdays, 7:30 p.m., and Sundays, 3 p.m. Through June 26. Pillbury House Theatre is located at 3501 Chicago Ave. S., Mpls., 55407. For tickets: pillsburyhouseandtheatre.org or 612-825-0459.
Adam M. Schencka can be reached at [email protected].
