So, I go to a play at Steppenwolf and the first half of the play, everyone is in stitches. Out of their minds. Laughing so hard I start to feel uncomfortable. What's happening on stage is a white guy, who owns a coffeeshop, has hired a young black man to work there. The coffeeshop is dying. It's actually a donut shop. No one buys donuts anymore. And everybody is a racist. Sort of. To some degree. And the young black man is really funny. Or, Tracy Letts put these very funny lines in this young actors mouth, and he's funny and everybody is losing their minds. And I can't help thinking this isn't a comedy. I want to swing my arm behind my seat the way dad used to when we were being too noisy in the car. Dad didn't like the radio on and he didn't like us jumping up and down on the seats, and so the arm swung back. Shh, the arm said, you're going to get us killed. And that's what I wanted to do to these two women sitting behind me. I wanted to swing my arm back and say "This is a goddamn tragedy. Tracy Letts is tricking us. Something terrible is about to happen. Just wait." All I could think, as the laughing spread butter on more butter, was that there were no black people in the audience, that we were laughing at the funny black man.
Then, the audience finds out the young black character has written a book. It's the great American novel. He says to his boss "You don't think a black man can write the Great American novel?" I wonder if a black man did write the great American novel, if it would still end up in the African American lit section. And I think "boom! there's the smoking gun." The book is the young man's life work and it might not even count, but at the very least something bad is going to happen to the book. In an acting class, my teacher told me, nobody ever brings a gun onto the stage unless its going to go off. Sometimes a gun is a gun. Sometimes something else is the gun. The young man has been writing the book his whole life. The white man, who owns the shop reads it. He loves it. The young black man is overwhelmed with joy. Then the white guy says "It's totally engaging, the while time. It's amazing." The young man wants criticism, honesty. The older white guy says "Okay, one question. What's the main character want?" Boom! The smoking gun goes off. There it is. The young black man is horrified. "You read that whole book and you don't know what the main character wants?" I think, uh-oh, we're the white guy, totally engaged, laughing our asses off, not a clue what's actually going on. But jeepers, ain't the decorations perty?
"Right." The white guy says. "What's he want?"
Truth be told, we could have been taped for a laugh track before the play became a goddman tragedy.
I'm reminded of David Mamet. His plays always make me uncomfortable. That's his job as a playwright, to get under the skin-to hold the mirror up to the world. I'm like "Ick, sorry for my part."
I loved the play, but I don't always love the world, and the world was in the play, so I've got one finger pointing at Letts, saying "Wow." and one finger pointing at the world, saying "Yikes."
I can't help thinking about my sister who works with black teenage youths, in a very poor area. She gets so frustrated with people. "They are just kids," she says, "but people are so afraid of them. And it doesn't help that they have to make themselves look tough. But people will always be afraid when they see them. People will cross the street or hold onto their bags. But they're just kids, but the experience they are having in the world is that people don't want them around."
I think about the funny young black actor in the first half of the play-the guy who made everybody laugh. So hard. Because he was funny. And the jokes came at us like oozies, and if I didn't feel suffocated by the masses, I may have been laughing too.
Tracy, I get that to bring people on board, you gotta reel them in with laughter. Otherwise, god forbid, we wouldn't care what happened to the kid. If he showed up dressed like some of my sisters students, we might even think that he deserved the tragedy that swooped in during act two. Hanging over our heads, like a beautiful chandellier in act one.
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