Theater Review: Fairview, a Wild and Powerful Exploration of Whites' Views of Black America
Fairview
Written by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Directed by Sarah Benson
Starring Roslyn Ruff
Soho Rep/Theater for a New Audience
Polansky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn
July 11, 2019
Fairview (2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year. Previously seen in small theaters off Broadway in in Berkeley, California, it’s moved to the larger 300 seat Polansky Center in Brooklyn and has had a sold out run. The play’s intensity translated very well indeed, as the surprises and shock value commented upon in the original was very much present the night I saw it. Fairview has no substantive plot. We observe an upper middle class black family plan and experience their grandmother’s birthday dinner, rather like a standard US sitcom. But the play comes across as if a Cosby Show episode was shown, then put in a blender, kneaded, acidified, than thrust back in the face of the audience. Its structure and tone was unlike anything I have seen, and while I don’t think it was always successful, it certainly was a visceral experience.
Fairview is the latest play I have seen emerging from young playwrights who are determined to go beyond prior black artists’ efforts to dramatize the African-American experience. Where earlier efforts like A Raisin in the Sun (1959) alternately aimed for sympathy, understanding, and pity from the white audience and was modulated in depicting black rage, these modern playwrights seem to be looking for creative ways to depict long-repressed black frustration and disempowerment. Just in the last year, I have seen two plays by Jeremy O. Harris, one (Daddy: A Melodrama) that used mixed-race, mixed-class gay sex as a template for expressing frustrations over black accommodation vs. rebellion, and another (The Slave Play) that shocked us with explicit sexual mixed-race sex and hatred, exploring how black and white people may not be able to really partner with one another. Geraldine Inoa’s Scraps allowed us to see the rage in the black community up close and personal, putting a microscope on how the community experiences police brutality. Perhaps Jordan E. Cooper’ dark comedy Ain’t No Mo went farthest, positing that the only way to end the endless cycle of black struggle, accommodation, class climbing, and resentment was by a wholesale immigration back to Africa.
Fairview goes farther than all of these, explicitly abandoning efforts to explain the black experience to white audiences, and instead separating the races and directing healing words at only the black viewers. I’ll save an explanation of how it does this until the end (in case you plan to see the play), but the ending is far from the only innovation here. Fairview begins with the audience viewing the symbolic, empty, brightly lit set as they enter. It is a frighteningly off-white two story living room, where the entire color palette is from pure white to muted pastels. The artwork is inoffensive and generic, but very blandly tasteful and expensive-looking. I have seen just these houses in expensive suburbs (it was almost of a photocopy of one home I visited in suburban Tampa, from my memory). Everything is in place, carefully thought through, and utterly soulless. Careful examination revealed that the portraits of (black) family members were carefully arranged in perfect symmetry along the staircase wall, each framed in an identical, pure white frame.
Act 1 is then a slightly surreal version of a 1990’s sit com. The black family is funny, mostly inoffensive, inclined to dance to R&B or rap hits on cue, and seemingly subjected to (stereo)typical upper middle class pressures—will daughter Jasmine take a year off before going to college? Did daddy get the right ingredients for mom’s meticulously planned dinner? Grandma, the guest of honor, never appears, and seems to make everyone nervous. Before dinner gets started, there is a sudden ending to the act, then a long, intentionally clunky scene change. Then things get surreal. The lights change to a radioactive pale fluorescent pink, there is a pervasive machine whine that gets under your skin, and we see the entire first act played again.
Only this time, the actors mime their parts with identical actions, with amplified new audio dialogue. Four new, unseen (white-sounding) voices start with a well-meaning but ultimately racist intellectual discussion on the topic “If you could be any other race, what would you be?”. Their stereotypes about being black (or Latino, or Slav) amplify, then their interchange shifts, as they become invisible observers of the (silent) action of the black characters on stage, commenting on them as if they were circus animals (Look at them dance! They are sooo good!). Finally, as the mimed action on stage climaxes in momma collapsing from stress, the white people’s dialogue amplifies/degenerates into a hate-filled description of a slasher movie, with the male speaker excited that when he’s watching sucha movie he can control and revel in the violence and have the fantasy of doing anything he wants. So, superimposed on a mimed black suburban drama (echoes of whiteface miming of the past), we hear the sublimated hatred and violence behind white perceptions of black people. The use of metaphor is here as effective in its way as was Jordan Peele’s equally creative 2017 film Get Out, with its sci-fi white expropriation of black bodies.
Next, the actual suburban play resumes in normal lighting, but now becomes an Ionesco-like absurdist drama, as comically huge food props are loaded on the table, and the family dinner spirals into a parody of family feasts. The four previously-unseen white characters march on stage portraying (and perceived by the family) as additional black family members, speaking in mock black accents, language, and behavior (twerking, rapping), but in a crudely parodistic manner. This is the way white culture has misappropriated black culture for its entertainment, and about how black America has gone along with this. This goes on a bit, with all except the teenage daughter Jasmine thinking all is normal—older generations of white and black Americans are used to playing along with the status quo. Jasmine increasingly perceives something is twisted and wrong, and suddenly draws the play to a halt. SPOILER WARNING: At this point, scroll down and STOP READING until the final paragraph if you want to see the play.
Thus far the play has used absurdist devices to make us see how black culture is always viewed through uncomprehending white eyes. The play climactically drives this point home with a final risky and extraordinary device. Daughter Jasmine (the brave and excellent Roslyn Ruff) declares that the white audience present will never be able to see the onstage events accurately, and invites, then insists, that the white audience members leave their seats and go physically on stage, switching place with the black actors, so to know what it is like to be viewed as “others”. Once they move, that will allow her to move into the theater seats and speak directly to the remaining (black) audience, thus marginalizing the white audience trapped on the stage. Special stairways are created for the white audience to do this, and I would guess that over 100 went onstage (I did not), looking variably uncomfortable, sympathetic, and dutiful. It’s a spectacular device. Unfortunately, the shock value of it overshadows what Jasmine actually says in the remaining 10 minutes while talking to her (largely) black audience. After berating a few non-migrating white people to go onstage, she ends with a speech mostly consisting of comforting, calm new-agey platitudes. It felt like the playwright, having designed this spectacular coup-de-theatre, never quite figured out exactly how to address the (now isolated, but dominant) black audience with anything except healing therapy-words: perhaps without the overbearing presence of white society, black people can now have a “fair view” of themselves. Was there any other message to them? What should they now do? No real conclusion or suggestions for real social change emerged. Unlike the ending of Ain’t No Mo, where black Americans have left the country, leaving the rest of us to grieve for what we have all lost, Fairview provided no real emotional clincher other than the gut punch of a metaphorical racial separation. You may ask why I did not join many of my white audience-mates on stage. I am not sure--part of it was my innate unwillingness to join in crowds, be manipulated, or do as I am told. Part was my wanting to view the totality of the play (including the responses of both audiences) from my perch, and part was my not feeling a real part of the playwright’s anger. While I see why she (and some other minority members) feel that such a role-swapping segregation is an emotionally satisfying resolution, and the best way to educate the white majority, I don’t really have the same feelings.
END OF SPOILER. As I think about this provocative, wildly original play, I most loved its strong, metaphorical points about black-white relationships in the USA. I think it's closest in spirit to Peele’s film Get Out. Both works used extreme devices (farce or science fiction) to explicitly demonstrate how white society has expropriated, manipulated, and tamed black culture, all with ongoing tragedy for black people. In Fairview, as we see blacks happily dancing in a “white” suburban home, with a voice overlay of racist hate speech, there is an explicit demonstration of the superimposed oppression of our society. This I think is most brilliant device of the play. Framing things in an absurdist format takes the non-black audience out our conventional theater-going roles where we try to sympathize, empathize, and imagine what it would be like to live in black America; instead, the playwright suggests that white people cannot empathize, since we are not a part of it and, in fact still cause the problem via sins of commission or omission. The playwright’s lack of a solution is unfortunate but not surprising…none was provided in any in the above described plays either. It seems like black dramatists have found new, creative voices for demonstrating and analyzing the problem, but not yet for solutions. But is re-segregation, as suggested here, really the way out? I have lived in a very mixed-race community for four years now, and have observed my own gradually increasing acceptance and comfort, now becoming more of an expectation that this is the only right way to live. As a minor, theatrical example, when I recently saw an all-white Fiddler on the Roof, I was surprised at how much the homogeneity of the actors’ appearance bothered me. That would not have been the case four years ago. Immersion and familiarity does help overcome bias and prejudice. So the separation, or re-segregation proposed in this and other plays does not ring true for me. Of course, comfortable co-existence is not the same thing as solving underlying, long-enforced inequality. I lack the rage and long-internalized humiliations of many black Americans. It was good to see these emotions expressed onstage in this play in such a dramatic and original way. I truly hope that Fairview is eventually seen as a necessary and poignant stage of black Americans finally expressing and demanding their equality. But I sure hope we can get beyond its (non) solutions. This may take a while..
Written by Jackie Sibblies Drury
Directed by Sarah Benson
Starring Roslyn Ruff
Soho Rep/Theater for a New Audience
Polansky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn
July 11, 2019
Fairview (2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year. Previously seen in small theaters off Broadway in in Berkeley, California, it’s moved to the larger 300 seat Polansky Center in Brooklyn and has had a sold out run. The play’s intensity translated very well indeed, as the surprises and shock value commented upon in the original was very much present the night I saw it. Fairview has no substantive plot. We observe an upper middle class black family plan and experience their grandmother’s birthday dinner, rather like a standard US sitcom. But the play comes across as if a Cosby Show episode was shown, then put in a blender, kneaded, acidified, than thrust back in the face of the audience. Its structure and tone was unlike anything I have seen, and while I don’t think it was always successful, it certainly was a visceral experience.
Fairview is the latest play I have seen emerging from young playwrights who are determined to go beyond prior black artists’ efforts to dramatize the African-American experience. Where earlier efforts like A Raisin in the Sun (1959) alternately aimed for sympathy, understanding, and pity from the white audience and was modulated in depicting black rage, these modern playwrights seem to be looking for creative ways to depict long-repressed black frustration and disempowerment. Just in the last year, I have seen two plays by Jeremy O. Harris, one (Daddy: A Melodrama) that used mixed-race, mixed-class gay sex as a template for expressing frustrations over black accommodation vs. rebellion, and another (The Slave Play) that shocked us with explicit sexual mixed-race sex and hatred, exploring how black and white people may not be able to really partner with one another. Geraldine Inoa’s Scraps allowed us to see the rage in the black community up close and personal, putting a microscope on how the community experiences police brutality. Perhaps Jordan E. Cooper’ dark comedy Ain’t No Mo went farthest, positing that the only way to end the endless cycle of black struggle, accommodation, class climbing, and resentment was by a wholesale immigration back to Africa.
Fairview goes farther than all of these, explicitly abandoning efforts to explain the black experience to white audiences, and instead separating the races and directing healing words at only the black viewers. I’ll save an explanation of how it does this until the end (in case you plan to see the play), but the ending is far from the only innovation here. Fairview begins with the audience viewing the symbolic, empty, brightly lit set as they enter. It is a frighteningly off-white two story living room, where the entire color palette is from pure white to muted pastels. The artwork is inoffensive and generic, but very blandly tasteful and expensive-looking. I have seen just these houses in expensive suburbs (it was almost of a photocopy of one home I visited in suburban Tampa, from my memory). Everything is in place, carefully thought through, and utterly soulless. Careful examination revealed that the portraits of (black) family members were carefully arranged in perfect symmetry along the staircase wall, each framed in an identical, pure white frame.
Act 1 is then a slightly surreal version of a 1990’s sit com. The black family is funny, mostly inoffensive, inclined to dance to R&B or rap hits on cue, and seemingly subjected to (stereo)typical upper middle class pressures—will daughter Jasmine take a year off before going to college? Did daddy get the right ingredients for mom’s meticulously planned dinner? Grandma, the guest of honor, never appears, and seems to make everyone nervous. Before dinner gets started, there is a sudden ending to the act, then a long, intentionally clunky scene change. Then things get surreal. The lights change to a radioactive pale fluorescent pink, there is a pervasive machine whine that gets under your skin, and we see the entire first act played again.
Only this time, the actors mime their parts with identical actions, with amplified new audio dialogue. Four new, unseen (white-sounding) voices start with a well-meaning but ultimately racist intellectual discussion on the topic “If you could be any other race, what would you be?”. Their stereotypes about being black (or Latino, or Slav) amplify, then their interchange shifts, as they become invisible observers of the (silent) action of the black characters on stage, commenting on them as if they were circus animals (Look at them dance! They are sooo good!). Finally, as the mimed action on stage climaxes in momma collapsing from stress, the white people’s dialogue amplifies/degenerates into a hate-filled description of a slasher movie, with the male speaker excited that when he’s watching sucha movie he can control and revel in the violence and have the fantasy of doing anything he wants. So, superimposed on a mimed black suburban drama (echoes of whiteface miming of the past), we hear the sublimated hatred and violence behind white perceptions of black people. The use of metaphor is here as effective in its way as was Jordan Peele’s equally creative 2017 film Get Out, with its sci-fi white expropriation of black bodies.
Next, the actual suburban play resumes in normal lighting, but now becomes an Ionesco-like absurdist drama, as comically huge food props are loaded on the table, and the family dinner spirals into a parody of family feasts. The four previously-unseen white characters march on stage portraying (and perceived by the family) as additional black family members, speaking in mock black accents, language, and behavior (twerking, rapping), but in a crudely parodistic manner. This is the way white culture has misappropriated black culture for its entertainment, and about how black America has gone along with this. This goes on a bit, with all except the teenage daughter Jasmine thinking all is normal—older generations of white and black Americans are used to playing along with the status quo. Jasmine increasingly perceives something is twisted and wrong, and suddenly draws the play to a halt. SPOILER WARNING: At this point, scroll down and STOP READING until the final paragraph if you want to see the play.
Thus far the play has used absurdist devices to make us see how black culture is always viewed through uncomprehending white eyes. The play climactically drives this point home with a final risky and extraordinary device. Daughter Jasmine (the brave and excellent Roslyn Ruff) declares that the white audience present will never be able to see the onstage events accurately, and invites, then insists, that the white audience members leave their seats and go physically on stage, switching place with the black actors, so to know what it is like to be viewed as “others”. Once they move, that will allow her to move into the theater seats and speak directly to the remaining (black) audience, thus marginalizing the white audience trapped on the stage. Special stairways are created for the white audience to do this, and I would guess that over 100 went onstage (I did not), looking variably uncomfortable, sympathetic, and dutiful. It’s a spectacular device. Unfortunately, the shock value of it overshadows what Jasmine actually says in the remaining 10 minutes while talking to her (largely) black audience. After berating a few non-migrating white people to go onstage, she ends with a speech mostly consisting of comforting, calm new-agey platitudes. It felt like the playwright, having designed this spectacular coup-de-theatre, never quite figured out exactly how to address the (now isolated, but dominant) black audience with anything except healing therapy-words: perhaps without the overbearing presence of white society, black people can now have a “fair view” of themselves. Was there any other message to them? What should they now do? No real conclusion or suggestions for real social change emerged. Unlike the ending of Ain’t No Mo, where black Americans have left the country, leaving the rest of us to grieve for what we have all lost, Fairview provided no real emotional clincher other than the gut punch of a metaphorical racial separation. You may ask why I did not join many of my white audience-mates on stage. I am not sure--part of it was my innate unwillingness to join in crowds, be manipulated, or do as I am told. Part was my wanting to view the totality of the play (including the responses of both audiences) from my perch, and part was my not feeling a real part of the playwright’s anger. While I see why she (and some other minority members) feel that such a role-swapping segregation is an emotionally satisfying resolution, and the best way to educate the white majority, I don’t really have the same feelings.
END OF SPOILER. As I think about this provocative, wildly original play, I most loved its strong, metaphorical points about black-white relationships in the USA. I think it's closest in spirit to Peele’s film Get Out. Both works used extreme devices (farce or science fiction) to explicitly demonstrate how white society has expropriated, manipulated, and tamed black culture, all with ongoing tragedy for black people. In Fairview, as we see blacks happily dancing in a “white” suburban home, with a voice overlay of racist hate speech, there is an explicit demonstration of the superimposed oppression of our society. This I think is most brilliant device of the play. Framing things in an absurdist format takes the non-black audience out our conventional theater-going roles where we try to sympathize, empathize, and imagine what it would be like to live in black America; instead, the playwright suggests that white people cannot empathize, since we are not a part of it and, in fact still cause the problem via sins of commission or omission. The playwright’s lack of a solution is unfortunate but not surprising…none was provided in any in the above described plays either. It seems like black dramatists have found new, creative voices for demonstrating and analyzing the problem, but not yet for solutions. But is re-segregation, as suggested here, really the way out? I have lived in a very mixed-race community for four years now, and have observed my own gradually increasing acceptance and comfort, now becoming more of an expectation that this is the only right way to live. As a minor, theatrical example, when I recently saw an all-white Fiddler on the Roof, I was surprised at how much the homogeneity of the actors’ appearance bothered me. That would not have been the case four years ago. Immersion and familiarity does help overcome bias and prejudice. So the separation, or re-segregation proposed in this and other plays does not ring true for me. Of course, comfortable co-existence is not the same thing as solving underlying, long-enforced inequality. I lack the rage and long-internalized humiliations of many black Americans. It was good to see these emotions expressed onstage in this play in such a dramatic and original way. I truly hope that Fairview is eventually seen as a necessary and poignant stage of black Americans finally expressing and demanding their equality. But I sure hope we can get beyond its (non) solutions. This may take a while..
Comments
Post a Comment