"Black Like Us" furthers important community explorations about race

Florence (Chelsea Binta) & Maxine (Dior Davenport) in Black Like Us (photo by Shane Regan)

Black Like Us
Annex Theatre
(co-produced by Brownbox Theatre)
through March 1

Black Like Us wades in where a lot of others fear to tread, a full-out discussion of race in our veins. A recent Pacific Science Center exhibit focused on race and scientists discovered about a decade ago how one mutation in one gene (out of 3.1 billion?) may be the genesis for the lighter pink/yellow skin coloration that proliferated across Europe. Yet, skin color became the great divide in society.

The premise of the play starts with varied skin color within the same family. Two sisters are shaded differently: one lighter and one darker. That truth, already a head-shaker one might think, to those who see only "black" and "white," in 1950s Seattle, leads the one with lighter skin to escape the oppressive nature of the racial divide by "passing as white" and even loving and marrying an Italian and not introducing him to her family.

"Passing" was considered a trick and a con. Regardless of how absurd it was and is to categorize people by skin hue, "passing" was ... ummm... illegally claiming to be white, even though that is what any "white" person does due to skin color. So, it's with a mixture of shame and defiance that Florence (Chelsea Binta) leaves her family behind. The consequences, to both sides of the family, are what the rest of the plot focuses on.

Florence's children and grandchildren appear as white as their father/grandfather. Her choice to hide apparently does not get revealed through DNA transfer in skin color. We meet, in the play, her daughter and three granddaughters (Devin Rodgers, Alyson Scadron Branner, Lindsay Evans and McKenna Turner). 

Florence's sister, Maxine (Dior Davenport), becomes a black activist, marries, has at least one child we don't meet, and two granddaughters we do (Marquicia Dominguez and Kia Pierce). Maxine becomes acquainted with Florence's daughter, Donna, when Donna moves into a neighborhood she can afford - aka the diverse neighborhood that Florence grew up in and Maxine remains in. 

Fertile ground is plowed in the script when the three white granddaughters figure out their grandmother was "black" and go looking for their cousins. Branner's role, Sandra, gets to be the outrageous and funny say-it-like-it-is sister who relishes how she now has a lot more to talk about, and maybe her kids might benefit by "minority status" in applications to college. 

There are a lot of laughs in the play, both easily enjoyable ones and uncomfortable titters, as we are forced to examine our own deeply buried (perhaps) thoughts about skin color, how we were raised, who we are now, whether we behave the way we believe, if we have knee-jerk reactions we'd rather not have. Sandra addresses head-on, in her way, whether it's ok to call people "black" or "African-American" and embarrasses her sisters by having "I'm Black and I'm Proud" as her ring-tone. 

So, kudos for considering and then creating this play and getting it on stage to help us all look inward and explore, and perhaps revise.

Now for hoped-for revisions:

The play grew from a ten minute short to a 30-minute short to what is now close to a two and a half hour marathon. It is massively too long and undercuts the challenge it presents to audiences to look inward by awkwardly inserting soap-opera-like elements.

The "how" the granddaughters find out Florence was black includes a sister who won't tell why she already had suspicions before they find a mysterious box. Scene after short scene simply ends when Michelle just doesn't answer her sisters' questions. It takes them forever to push back and finally get the answer: she had infertility tests which revealed sickle cell anemia genes (a gene known to most-often be a hereditary possibility among African-Americans). That fact is important, but the character development it adds is nil and the addition of some odd kind of cliff-hanger scenes is incomprehensible.

The interactions between Maxine's granddaughters and Florence's granddaughters are fun and interesting and there could be more there. There are realistic questions on the part of the "left behind" family as to why they should wish to interact with the "white" family that just found out they are "black." The question of who we are and who the world perceives us to be is quite important.

The relationship on stage between Florence and Maxine is also mysterious. Short scenes between the two of them at different decades of time show that they never reconcile, but not why. They don't include more information except one tangential mention that Florence had apparently reconnected with her parents and even financially supported them in their declining health, but Maxine didn't know.

There is a scene saved to the end that shows how Florence gets her idea to "pass" and that it could provide benefits. However, the reasons Florence chooses this direction are never made clear, and that is one potent area for theatrical exploration. There doesn't seem to be any fear that her choice will be revealed to her husband upon delivery of a child, which would add to her danger of discovery. 

There are some great moments in the play and some telling and intelligent exploration of the topic. Playwright Rachel Atkins has created interesting and unique characters who have distinct voices. There is almost material there for two plays, though, one between the sisters and one among the grandchildren! But for the moment, the substantive play has been allowed to grow with the help of cliche'd moments of melodrama that detract, bore, and release the audience from their tensions. Once released, we too often tune out and then ignore. There is too much here that needs attention to allow that to happen.

For more information, go to www.annextheatre.org or call 206-728-0933.

Review/Discussion: "A Great Wilderness" is a complicated, valiant effort

Braden Abraham and Samuel Hunter (Andry Laurence)

Playwright Samuel Hunter chooses uncomfortable characters or they choose him, as evidenced in his play, The Whale, about a morbidly obese man, and in the world premiere play, A Great Wilderness, now being presented at Seattle Repertory Theatre. Here, the uncomfortable character is an old man ending a career working as a gay-conversion therapist.

When we get invited to a play, we reviewer-types get press releases with blurbs written to entice audiences to come to the show, while encapsulating what it’s about. The Rep said this about this play:

Walt has devoted his life to counseling teenage boys out of their homosexuality at his remote Idaho wilderness camp. Pressured to accept one last client, his carefully constructed life begins to unravel with the arrival of Daniel. When Daniel disappears, Walt is forced to ask for help—both in finding the missing boy and reconciling his past with the present.

Sometimes, even when only reading the press releases once, and cursorily at that, their context can be very influential and not always in a very positive way. The phrase that resonated with me prior to seeing the play was “reconciling his past with the present.” In fact, after seeing the play, what was on the stage really had nothing to do with reconciling his past with the present.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hunter is demonstrably a brilliant, up-and-coming playwright and his challenging topics are gripping. In this play, he clearly desires to get inside of and “play around in” (no fun intended here) the mindsets of people he came into contact with as a boy in small-town Pacific Northwest who believe deeply in Scripture and have been taught that Scripture declares homosexuality a sin, and therefore, want to help anyone they know stop sinning, if at all possible. They have been told that homosexuality is a choice, that it is a “lifestyle,” that it is mutable. Therefore, they can influence someone and train him (usually him) out of it.

An industry developed, as we know, that worked to “cure” young boys of their sins of homosexual thoughts or actions, and psychology participated in the wrong-headed notion of mutability for many, many years. Often, this therapy was also given in a wilderness camp environment, a get-away from normal life in order to allow new ways of living to be cemented before returning.

Now, we are evolving, and we begin to understand that this is not a “choice” and not mutable. It is as biologically determinate as blue eyes or brown hair or left-handedness. And we know traits are dominant and recessive. Yet no one who is righthanded can change to being lefthanded without almost superhuman efforts after losing an arm, for instance.

We know that boys who went through this kind of conversion therapy were essentially told that they could not stay who they were, were sinners, and could be saved. We know that boys who went through this therapy sometimes committed suicide, probably because they couldn’t change and didn’t feel like there was any other choice left.

Hunter wanted to illustrate the issue with a man who he reveals in the play to have had homosexual feelings when younger, and by having dialogue that states that those who often feel drawn to be therapists in the field are probably those who struggled with the same feelings as the boys they take on as clients.

What we see on stage, however, does not nearly get to Walt, the older man, working to reconcile his past with his present. That would really be a longer play or a different play.

What is on the stage is more about the legacy of building something and letting it go when the builder is gone. Much of the dialogue focuses on Walt’s transitioning to an elder facility and his friends’ desire to sell the camp he built rather than continuing the services of conversion therapy he offered there.

If the couple who wants to sell had wanted to go in a completely new direction, that would have been a clearer topic. But as Hunter writes this version (who knows if he will consider a rewrite?), it turns out that the couple consists of his ex-wife and her second husband, a … wait for it … conversion therapist, though a townie one. At one point, she accuses Walt of never having loved her, the implication being that since he was homosexual, he was unable to give her the love she needed. Then why would she marry another conversion therapist, if conversion therapists are mostly all men who struggled or struggle with homosexual issues themselves? (Not to mention that it’s a terrible accusation to say homosexuals can’t love people they’ve committed to, unless it’s supposed to be a statement from a still bitter ex-spouse.)

Braden Abraham directs a wonderful cast of acting talents in this interesting subject, who flesh out these characters as fully as they can. Michael Winter is compassionate as Walt, who is ending his career and uncertain of his impact on his “boys.” Jack Taylor displays great instincts as Daniel, the boy at the center who is lost and afraid and gentle and suspicious. Christine Estabrook plays a bossy, but understandable ex-spouse, with R. Hamilton Wright as her caught-in-the-middle spouse with few options to know what to do. Gretchen Krich has a fairly easy role as a forest ranger who doesn’t need to involve herself in the controversy. Mari Nelson does a solid turn in an underdeveloped role as Daniel’s mother.

As a non-Christian who is hyper sensitive to Christian thought, one of the surprises for me was how little Scripture there actually was in the play. It feels like Hunter missed the boat in this regard: the whole reason these Christians feel they must root out the sin is because of how central Scripture is to their whole lives. Everything revolves around the Bible and everything comes back to the Bible. I feel like I have some insight here from personal experiences.

Even the mother, married to a man who shunned his son, yet was one of the pastors of a mega-church, apparently, rarely mentions anything Biblical. No one prays for the missing boy. No one prays, at least out loud, for him or herself and for guidance. There is a crisis and yet no prayers are said? No one holds hands? No one invokes God or Jesus, almost at all?

There is, perhaps, a very important exploration here. Boys continue, and girls continue, to commit suicide. The It Gets Better project and online musicals like TheHinterlands try to penetrate the vast middle of this country to get word to those small-town boys and girls who feel different and who are afraid of themselves and what they are told is their sin that they control.

While the production of A Great Wilderness begins to explore the issue, the best parts of that exploration are the scenes between Walt and Daniel. The rest of the characters get in the way, right now, and distract from what probably should be the heart of the experience, and the challenge to Walt should probably be right in front of him: Daniel. Staying put. Believing in himself. Showing Walt that Walt can love himself, too.

I welcome your comments.

(Information at www.seattlerep.org or call 206-443-2222.)