plays

I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays

barbara — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

It has always been Sonia Sanchez the poet I’ve known and loved, with strong works like Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, and Like The Singing Coming Off the Drums. Sonia the poet, a towering figure in my mind when I think of the powerful black woman poets that still get me through this life and inspire me to write. But there is Sonia Sanchez the playwright too, and I’m so glad to meet her in this critical new collection I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays. This collection finally brings together all of Sanchez’s dramatic works, previously published and unpublished, spanning from 1969 to 2009.

As one of the major writers of the Black Arts movement, Sonia’s bold and creative voice demanded to be heard among an intimidating arena of popular black male writers, many of whom nurtured chauvinistic ideals. We are all now aware of the rampant misogyny that permeated this period during the sixties and seventies, when sadly too many black men saw the possibility of liberation through the destructive lens of patriarchy and inflated notions of manhood. Sanchez unflinchingly addressed such issues in her drama, which can best be described as poetic fire infused with hope for a better reality for black people in what she would term “this place called America.”

1974’s Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us? is a play that only a woman with a deep love for her people and a real desire to save them could write. It painfully shines a light on the damaging effects of addiction and the open degradation of women in the militant black community. The play is broken into three groups of characters, each with different stories that reflect the problematic behavior prevalent at the time yet often hiding behind “revolutionary” rhetoric. In “Group II” we meet five men riding white rocking horses who revel in physically and verbally abusing two women, “White Whore” and “Black Whore.” Although the men proclaim to espouse revolution and progress, they are abusers as well as slaves to their drug addictions and sexual appetites.

Sanchez’s love for the women who suffered during this period is honored in the 1969 play Sister Son/Ji. Son/Ji is eventually left alone to deal with the consequences of her commitment to a movement that, as Sanchez says “cannot catch her when she falls down in midnight solitude.” There were women who lost their minds as a result of choosing such a life, she says. Women like Son/Ji who threw themselves into the cause even while losing their children to war. In one of the book’s two essays, “Poetry Run Loose,” Sanchez lifts up Son/Ji as one who survived many years of death and sacrifice and chooses to speak in spite of her scars.

Placing these plays within their historical context is important, but they also hold up today as dramas that uplift and motivate their audiences and readers, dramas with messages that are still valuable. As this collection reminds us, there is Sonia Sanchez the activist too.

Written by: Natalie Maxwell, December 26th 2010

Women Writers of the Provincetown Players: A Collection of Short Works

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Judith E. Barlow

State University of New York Press

For someone whose theater knowledge is limited to a high school rendition of Cheaper by the Dozen, the compilation of plays that comprises Women Writers of the Provincetown Players were both easy and enjoyable to read.

Prefaced with a twenty-three -page introduction outlining the history and significance of the group of women included in Women Writers of the Provincetown Players, the book quickly but adequately fills in the reader. Many of the plays are between ten and twenty pages, and range in subject from feminism to love, or simply intellectual entertainment. The opening line of the introduction prepares the reader for the impact these playwrights had, as “during the opening years of the twentieth century, women’s designated place in the theater was in the audience.”

To counter this irritating—to say the least—situation, a number of women writers joined the Provincetown Players, a group of radical visionaries, but hardly outcasts. These educated middle class citizens summered in Provincetown and joined together to “oppose the status quo of their conservative hometowns and [dedicate] themselves to supporting artistic innovation, questioning the capitalist system, reevaluating relations between women and men, and challenging traditional sexual mores.”

From the first play in the collection these goals are evident, yet apropos to the time. Winter’s Night by Neith Boyce opens the book on a strong feminist note by posing the radical notion that the lead character, Rachel, “is less a victim of the two brothers than of the assumption that marriage is the ideal situation for all women.” While by today’s standards the main plot of the story may appear to be an uncomfortable love triangle between a woman, her recently deceased husband, and his living brother, the real aim of the piece is to broach a touchy idea: that marriage may be more of a trap for women than the assumed salvation.

In addition to the opening chapter informing the reader to the significance of the works in Women Writers of the Provincetown Players, each play is accompanied by a short (roughly three pages) introduction giving background on the author and where the included work fits in the Provincetown Players' repertoire.

Many of the woman who contributed to this book with their theatrical works were better known for other uncommon feats for their time. Susan Glaspell, for example, was publishing long before she began her secondary education at Drake University; others, such as Rita Wellman, had been publishing since childhood. Edna St. Vincent Millay was a known poet before joining the group, and Djuna Barnes is described, impressively, as a “novelist, playwright, journalist, theater reviewer, and poet.” The book is a pleasant read, seeing the progress of women in both art and society.

Written by: Tatiana Ryckman, April 28th 2010

The Emperor Jones (1/07/2009)

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:48:00 +0000

The Goodman Theatre

Chicago, Illinois

"I learn more when I'm being entertained," a student wrote in a journal last year. The Wooster Group is known for subversive provocation, so if that is your idea of entertainment—if you find ideas entertaining or meta-performance inevitable and intriguing, not pretentious or contrived—bring the whole chain-gang of your internal critics and cultural conscience down to this staging of Eugene O'Neill's 1920 work when next performed.

Brutus Jones, the self-anointed king of a West Indian island, faces insurrection by his "fool bush nigger" subjects. There is nothing comfortable in seeing a white actor in blackface perform the dialect of minstrelsy for an hour, but it might be more uncomfortable for a contemporary Caucasian audience to hear the same script from the lips of a black man. I became excruciatingly aware of the degree to which performance is a contract between the actors and the audience: the payment and the acquiescent listening in exchange for the promise of amusement or edification.

The Wooster Group earns its reputation not only through Kate Valk's astoundingly dedicated recitation, a virtuosic testimony to commitment and craft, but also through its visual and musical components. The minimalist set, elaborate Kabuki-influenced costumes, limited palette, upstage televisions offering intermittent grids or pulsing blobs, choreographed sequences, and soundtrack that intersperses drumming with segments more reminiscent of Tangerine Dream all combine to present an interpretation that engages and enlightens through raising more questions than it answers. Current events make O'Neill's lines resonate: “For the small stealing, they put you in jail. For the big stealing, they make you Emperor.”

The demographic of the press night crowd at the Goodman also underlined Jones' plaintive cry: “What are you looking at, white folks?” Can anyone transcend essentialism? History dictates that a black actor performing in whiteface in no way carries the same impact as the reverse, just as there is nothing that I can say on the street in response to a catcall that is fully retaliatory. There is no such thing as neutral speech.

In theory, we are entering a post-racial society. In reality, the fact that this production is a powerful event, even with its cool self-aware certitude, indicates that we have not. Jones knows the Baptist Church, and the Bible says that the sins of the fathers are visited for four generations (Exodus 34:6-7). Legal slavery in the United States ended in 1865. It persists on the planet today. There is no shortage of human inhumanity to humans. What is the statute of limitations on atrocity? Perhaps all of us, like the Emperor, can declaim: "Forgive me, Lord. Forgive this poor sinner," or "Lord, I done wrong."

Photo credit: Paula Court

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, January 19th 2009