Grappling with Midwestern Memories: A New Lynching Play

American dramatist Charles Smith has given the nation a new lynching play of remarkable nuance and beauty. The Gospel According to James was commissioned by the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre as a way of engaging the state’s history—specifically, the lynching in Marion, Indiana that James Cameron survived, later founding the Black Holocaust Museum. The show ran at IRT from March 22 to April 10, 2011. From May 14 to June 12, 2011, the same cast and crew will bring it to life for Chicago audiences. Though inspired by racial violence in the Midwest, The Gospel According to James focuses on the role of memory in all accounts of history.

As Smith says in the author’s note, “[the play] is not about the lynching. The lynching is only the starting point.” Therefore, from the moment that he began facing the challenge of writing about this violent event, Smith had been sure about one thing: “I knew that I did not want to reproduce the lynching on stage.”

In this way, his work resembles the earliest black-authored lynching plays. Scripts about racial violence written in the 1910s and 1920s—such as Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1914/1916), Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918), Mary Burrill’s Aftermath (1919), and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) and Safe (1929)—refuse to describe, let alone portray, physical violence.

Adding to this tradition, Smith creates a fictional meeting between the black man who escaped the mob’s wrath and the white woman who had been with him that night. It is now the early 1980s—more than fifty years after the double lynching of Cameron’s friends Abe Smith and Tommy Shipp. James Cameron (André De Shields) asks Mary Ball, who now goes by “Marie” (Linda Kimbrough), to speak to a man who wants to make a documentary about the events that changed their lives. Marie is not at all interested in this project.

Still, the play unfolds as Marie and Cameron share what they remember about the events that led to the mob dragging the black teenagers through town. As they tell their stories, 16-year-old James Cameron (Anthony Peeples) and young Mary (Kelsey Brennan) appear downstage, along with the others involved. Mirroring the audience, the mature characters watch their younger selves in each other’s versions, sometimes learning details that they had no way of knowing in their teens. More crucial to the playwright’s purpose, though, they often disagree with each other’s accounts even when they had been privy to the exact same information.

The Gospel According to James confronts its audience with the impossibility of knowing exactly what happened that night. Indeed, the play suggests that (pace some historians’ claims) facts are never simply facts; all historical narratives are shaped by perspective. And this is especially true of histories wrought with the complexities that always attend race, sex, and violence in the United States.

From the very beginning of the action, Marie repeatedly calls Cameron a liar. She insists that he knows that events did not unfold as he claims in his autobiography and in interviews. Indeed, she is sarcastic as she declares that he has given the nation “the gospel according to James.”

It is not until much later that the audience discovers why Marie insists that Cameron lied. In a moment of empathy, she admits understanding why he said that her boyfriend Claude, who died that night in 1930, had been “a good white man.” If Cameron had told the truth about how low-down, dirty, and cruel Claude had been (to her and to others), there is no way that town whites would have let Cameron live.

From beginning to end, Smith’s work maintains a palpable tension. Painful stories contradict each other as they vie for space in the world, as they compete to survive and to be remembered. The play never offers its audience the comfort that comes with feeling certain…about what happened or about what motivated those involved. And Smith suggests that this uncertainty clings to all histories. History is shaped by memory. It therefore reflects what people are willing to remember and what they insist upon forgetting.

Smith’s work also suggests that language—the medium through which we create and convey history—sometimes reveals an investment in a particular image. After Cameron’s teenage friends are murdered, Mary’s father, Hoot Ball (Christopher Jon Martin), goes home and tells his wife Bea (Diane Kondrat) what has happened. He had been a member of the mob, and using that position of privilege, he had also helped save Cameron’s life. Still, his wife is shocked to discover that teenagers were lynched in her town. Hoot immediately corrects her: “Lynched? This ain’t Mississippi. This is Indiana. They were hanged!”

After James and Marie have finished sharing what they remember about that night and how it affected the rest of their lives, they have more compassion for each other. And they ultimately agree that when people face the past, they must decide either to bear witness to their truth or shirk that responsibility by trying to forget. Marie chooses the latter. She gives Cameron a necklace, her only memento from that night, and leaves him to grapple with his memories and hers.

Alone, Cameron faces all of the people whose stories were told as he and Marie shared their memories of that night in 1930. Charles Smith leaves his audience with an appreciation of the responsibility that Cameron shouldered. Having survived what his friends did not, Cameron refused to forget; he preserved stories that help make our nation’s history. He spent the rest of his life encouraging the country to face all of its truths so that all of its citizens might heal.

Anna Deveare Smith: Lessons on Living and Dying

Anna Deveare Smith's Let Me Down Easy once again demonstrates that the usual terms are not sufficient for what she accomplishes on stage. As in her most famous theatrical work, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Smith portrays many real-life characters, but “one-woman show” is not quite right. She places Lance Armstrong before us with as much force as she depicts Eve Ensler or Rev. Peter Gomes, and she does so by impeccably reproducing their accents, inflections, and gestures, and yet “impersonation” is not what we witness.

Part of what takes Smith’s work to another level is its commitment to testimony. As countless theorists have found, testimony is life-affirming because, by definition, it involves direct address. When a human being shares her story and another listens, the interlocutor becomes a witness.

In signature Smith style, Let Me Down Easy is composed of a series of monologues based on verbatim excerpts from face-to-face conversations. The twenty stories represented on stage are drawn from 320 interviews that Smith conducted on three continents. The monologues address the power of the human body as well as its limitations. They also explore the mental and spiritual aspects of both maximizing one’s physical potential and facing one’s mortality. Taken together, the monologues offer a powerful commentary on health care, the lack of it, and the implications of both. Smith became a witness for all 320 interviewees. And, she gives audiences an opportunity to bear witness to the humanity of the twenty people featured in this incarnation of the show—people who “have come through something.”

Because these are stories of real life, Let Me Down Easy highlights inequalities. For example, in the monologue titled “Heavy Sense of Resignation,” Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, a doctor at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, shares her experience of Hurricane Katrina. She explains that she had always insisted that limited financial resources did not keep the hospital from offering quality care. However, when it was clear that Charity was not being evacuated so that patients could avoid danger—while other hospitals were—she found it more difficult to maintain a cheerful bedside manner. Still, what she remembers most vividly is that her (mostly black) staff and patients were not surprised that authorities had apparently forgotten them. She confessed, “the fact that it wasn’t a shock was a shock for me.” As she shares her story, she still seems stunned: “It was the first time that I’d been abandoned by my government.” Very clearly, she was surrounded by people for whom this was not the first time.

While Smith channels Kurtz-Burke, we see the profound effect of stepping into another person’s point of view. With both her head and heart, she acknowledges that the country of her birth claims to value equality while treating its citizens very differently. More than that, she actually stopped to consider what that reality might feel like when, for an entire lifetime, one is not on the privileged end of that differential treatment.

Yet, without fail, Let Me Down Easy resists sentimentality; every emotion serves to inspire thought long afterward. This is particularly true of the show’s insistence that living and dying are inextricably linked. As palliative care specialist Eduardo Bruera puts it, people generally face death like they faced life. That is, if you were angry, you will probably be angry. Those who tend to retreat will probably withdraw, and those who blame will probably blame.

Having been touched by these stories, I went home thinking. If we die as we lived, then I am happy with many of the priorities I have kept, but there is always room for improvement. So, as I strive to live life in a way that will allow me to greet death with grace, Let Me Down Easy has inspired me to be more deliberate about becoming a witness for the experiences of my fellow human beings. How can I listen better today? How can I learn from others with both my head and heart? And how can I let that learning not only inform my outlook, but also shape what I believe merits saying out loud?

Let Me Down Easy has been recorded and will air on PBS during the 2011-2012 season of Great Performances. I hope it inspires you to take a similar challenge to live with intention.

Plays about Lynching in 2010: Recognizing History’s Presence

This year’s New York International Fringe Festival received applications from 800 theatre groups.  Approximately 200 shows were accepted and would be staged in August 2010.  Within the wide array of offerings, one presentation proved especially compelling:  Kym Gomes’s By Hands Unknown, which consists of seven one-act plays about lynching, many of which I examine in my forthcoming book.  Having studied these plays for many years, I was eager to see them staged for the first time, but I was also nervous.  How would these scripts fit together to make a coherent show?  They were all written in the 1920s and 1930s, when dramatic conventions were different from today’s.  Would they seem melodramatic and unrealistic?  Would they even be recognized as “good” plays?  As importantly, would the content feel relevant in 2010?

All of these questions could be answered with a resounding yes because the directors were so creative and resourceful, and the actors executed so well.  My more detailed performance review should appear in the May 2011 issue of Theatre Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press), but I want to share a few thoughts here.  The power of the presentation can be understood with a focus on its opening and closing moments.

The show began with a single light shining on Safiya Fredericks as she recited “Strange Fruit” from memory.  Though a musician accompanied her on guitar, she shared it as a poem, not a song.  However, most people know the lines because Billie Holiday made them famous with her 1939 recording, so the audience could instantly feel a sense of familiarity.  Beginning this way drew audience members in; we were reassured that we knew something about the subject matter.  There is always comfort in feeling like one has a way in, like one is not on the outside of an experience. 

This powerfully rendered poem gave way to Georgia Douglass Johnson’s one-act play A Sunday Morning in the South, in which a 19-year-old who aspires to be a lawyer is falsely accused of rape.  The action begins with Tom’s grandmother and younger brother teasing him about having fallen asleep at 8 o’clock the night before.  They laugh, recalling that he was snoring so loudly that they thought he might choke.  Soon, officers barge into the house, demanding to know where Tom had been at 10 o’clock the previous night.  The play dramatizes the moment when his testimony, and that of his family members, is disregarded.  The officers insist that they already have the case “figured out.”   

Gomes’s choice to begin with a piece that emphasizes African Americans’ exclusion from basic citizenship rights, such as due process, proved especially poignant as the show approached its end.  One by one, the actors emerged from the shadows to recite a portion of Resolution 39, the 2005 measure in which the U.S. Senate apologized for having never passed anti-lynching legislation.  By the time that all 18 members of the ensemble cast had stepped forward, the entire resolution had been shared, and they covered the stage from left to right, directly facing the audience.  Black and white, different ages and backgrounds, each actor took responsibility for recognizing that this is a history that we all share, encouraging audience members to do the same.

Knowing that the black rapist myth emerged only after slavery ended and black men had finally won the right to vote, I was especially struck by the challenge issued by the actors’ stance.  By labeling black men “rapists,” mobs insisted that they were simply protecting white women.  The charge overshadowed the real purpose of mob violence: to ensure that blacks remained terrified—and too preoccupied with basic survival—to claim full citizenship rights.  This white supremacist strategy has remained popular and effective.  Relentlessly labeling black and brown people “criminals” has always been a way of insisting that they are not entitled to civic inclusion.  Given this history, and the many ways that it shapes the present, we must understand that serious political realities are reflected in the way that Americans feel comfortable talking about people. 

It matters that many of us speak with disgust in our voices about “immigrants” who are black and brown—when all Americans are actually immigrants.  It also matters that the word “criminal” has a hard time clinging to white offenders, even though crimes against the environment and crimes that have cheated thousands out of their life savings are widely publicized.  The nation consistently demonizes black and brown citizens, but the stakes are becoming even higher with the growth of the prison industrial complex.  As legal scholar Michelle Alexander has shown in The New Jim Crow, the privatized prison system offers incentives for creating “felons” with laws that essentially target those who are black, brown, and/or poor.  However, laws addressing crimes mostly committed by whites, especially moneyed whites, ensure that they receive mild punishment and relatively little stigma.  Meanwhile, the “felons” become an underclass that cannot vote and is otherwise ostracized and excluded. 

The reactionary, sometimes violent politics that now coalesce around labels like “immigrant,” “criminal,” and “terrorist” resemble those justified by the earlier “black rapist” myth—especially because, when actual immigrants, criminals, and terrorists are white, they are somehow not known by those labels.  Though not equivalent, the situation was similar at the last turn of the century:  hysteria regarding the mythic black rapist made the documented rape of black women by white men a non-issue in mainstream discourse and public policy.   

Because By Hands Unknown begins and ends its engagement with lynching by raising questions about basic rights, it urges us to think seriously about who comes to mind when we say “citizen” today.

More about By Hands Unknown:

A Brava Company/Chelsea Rep LAB Production

Conceived by Kym Gomes
Directed by Harvey Huddleston, Kym Gomes
Associate Directors: Carmen Balentine, Ravin Patterson
Music Director: Bruce Baumer
Costumes by Jennifer Anderson

Ensemble Cast: Carmen Balentine, Michael Bunin, Valerie Elizabeth  Donaldson, Safiya Fredericks, Kym Gomes, Matt Hammond, Phil John, Nancy Keegan, Jamil Moore, Brett Pack, Alison Parks, Ravin Patterson, Jihan Ponti, Rick Schneider, Stefania Diana Schramm, Vonetta Steward, Temesgen Tocruray, Nathan Yates

RACE on Broadway: “Black Bitches” and Convenient Amnesia

David Mamet’s latest Broadway success, Race, has been receiving praise since its star-studded debut in December 2009. David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, and James Spader helped draw crowds, but reviews remained enthusiastic after they were replaced in mid-June. Even before the show’s Broadway run concluded, the Philadelphia Theatre Company announced that its upcoming season will feature Race. So, the play’s Broadway success has paved the way for profits on the road. Yet, when I traveled to New York sure that I would encounter intellectually challenging theatre, I was disappointed. Mamet’s work is characterized by a lack of complexity to be expected (perhaps) in college freshmen when they first arrive, not a respected artist.

The show’s most notable features? Its frequent use of the term “black bitch” and the convenient amnesia that produces its take-away message: whites, especially white men, are forced to tip-toe through life because blacks cry “discrimination” every chance they get.

In short, the play operates as if blacks wield unlimited social and legal power. According to Race, African Americans regularly make accusations--even false ones--and they are sure to triumph because whites (including those on juries) are afraid to appear racist. This flies in the face of the reality of U.S. discrimination suits. Further, it ignores the fact that non-whites are slow to label racist behavior because we know that our most painful experiences can be dismissed with “playing the race card, eh?”

The play centers on law partners (Jack, white and Henry, black) who debate whether they should defend a rich, white man (Charles Strickland) who has been accused of raping a black woman. The firm recently hired Susan, a young black female attorney whose rooky mistakes force them to take the case. Ultimately, though, she seems to have been a “traitor” all along, and Henry concludes that Jack compromised the firm by giving an “ungrateful” affirmative action baby a chance. In short, black women can only mean trouble. The uneducated ones falsely accuse you of rape, and the educated ones try to destroy your business with claims of discrimination or worse.

Naturally, then, “black bitch” is repeated throughout the production, and though the characters are often simply quoting others, this show confirmed that John McWhorter’s plea that we “make a deal on the N-word” underestimates the critical thinking that blacks routinely employ when we encounter racial epithets. (“Black nigger bitch” quotations emerge a couple times, too.) The play’s generous use of “black bitch” is tied to its overall logic, which depends on the idea that black women are temptresses that can ensnare men who are basically moral. The woman who has been raped never appears on stage, but she is constantly discussed. She is a prostitute whose rape charge is deemed irrelevant, if not ridiculous.

Mamet is known for crass language, so the epithet is not surprising, but its prominence calls attention to the only force that propels the action: the relentless reversal of historical facts. The notion that it is impossible to rape black women, because they are so naturally promiscuous, helped make slavery profitable. White men impregnated black women but their doing so not only made them rich and left their reputations intact, but it also somehow confirmed negative assumptions about blacks. These assumptions are not relics of the past. Indeed, the play relies on the audience’s awareness of the black whore stereotype but then denies its power. After all, audiences are expected to believe that whenever black women cry foul, white men are vulnerable.

Accepting Mamet’s portrait of American society requires ignoring power dynamics and the history that put them so firmly in place. Mamet has Susan reveal that Strickland has been flirting with her, and when asked why she thinks he would do that while being investigated for raping a black woman, she answers without hesitation, “He wants punishment.” In order for her to believe that, she must assume that white men accused by black women are sure to be prosecuted. Our nation’s past and present scream that this is not the case. More likely, Strickland is bold because he knows he won’t be punished.

In Mamet’s world, power dynamics favor blacks. Apparently, the exception makes the rule: Obama’s election means anti-black racism does not exist; there is only anti-white sentiment. Likewise, as suggested by Mamet’s earlier play, Oleanna, women who charge sexual harassment are not looking for protection under the law; they just want to manipulate men and the system. Oleanna originally appeared in 1992, on the heels of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Like Thomas, Mamet conjures up an altered history in which a black woman makes false accusations and the nation launches into action, punishing whomever she names. Must be science fiction; this world has never existed.