There's one passage in Suzan Lori-Parks' mostly excellent, always thought-provoking play that nevertheless just about killed it for me. You'll know it if you see it: it's the one where characters talk about their "place in the marketplace," in a weird, stilted mode of dialogue. A couple of days on, the stiltedness makes me wonder if there was something about that I didn't get; if it was maybe a deliberate awkwardness, the play gesturing towards the necessarily heavy-handed ways in which it will be interpreted. At the time, though, it felt like a kludge: a way of shoehorning the play into contemporary relevance. And, a few days on, I duly remember: just ending slavery hasn't solved the economic problem of race. It didn't need to do this: there was elsewhere a gracefulness of point, a subtlety to message, that this scene basically betrayed. Again, it might be the play simply refusing to let the audience miss a point. But what elsewhere made this play so great was its willingness to be less doctrinaire--to put it another way, to let itself be weirder, as it showed the filiations between slaves, their owners, culture, music, and what-have-you.
My favorite bit of askew: the performance started with a solo performer on blues guitar, who got there a few minutes early. He played a couple of songs; the audience applauded, and the play started. But throughout the performers not only acknowledged this performer--onstage the whole time--but also looked to him for encouragement. It was as though what was said on stage, the statements made by the various characters, wasn't entirely sufficient to persuade them: they needed affirmation, and maybe even another cultural register, to feel OK with what they were experiencing. They--and maybe we?--wanted black music to tell us that things were OK.
As I try to make sense of this, I have started to think of it as a piece about characters, unrooted from history, performing slavery, in the sense of reflecting on the choices they must make in living in the midst of an impossible situation. I came across the following, an image of the first production of A Doll's House, a while ago on an Internet search. And I kept thinking of this image, and this set, through this play. The flatness of the set, its representation of the three-dimensional domestic interior, reminds us of the relatively narrow range of choices daily life actually offers us; it brings the characters closer to one another, and visually emphasizes the comparisons between them. This piece uses a similar visual register. A small house was center stage for the first and third parts of this play, and hovered over the action of the second. Elements of the performance made and broke frames, made and broke frames. The characters wore costumes taken throughout American history: contemporary-seeming streetwear, a Negro Leagues jersey, a gifted Confederate uniform. The characters used present-day speech. All of this enhanced the frequent matter-of-factness of how the slave characters spoke: they were offered choices that allowed them to talk about their lives as though they had meaningful choices, which would lead them to a better arrangement within the domestic life this house gestures towards.
The point seemed not historical or even literal realism: that historical slavery routinely offered such choices, or even that all of the characters onstage could fit in this house. Rather it was to leave the play's context open, unfixed, imprecise: this was an attempt to show some of the dynamics of a slave society, but also to suggest how those dynamics repeat themselves in our society. It also showed slave characters grasping for what Ibsen's characters want, some place in a society and in a home, amidst conditions of domestic instability. The problem of slavery is not, then, just that slaves are beaten or dehumanised; but almost worst, that slaves are kept in a state of wanting universally-recognisable human things--home, family, possessions--that can be taken from them at any moment. The characters try to act rationally--indeed, experience themselves as economic actors. So this was a play about how people play broken games.
The central dilemma for Hero, the main character of this arc of plays, is whether to accompany his master to war or not. He's been promised freedom if he does so; but the choice is compromised by previous offers of freedom on which his master has reneged. At another moment, this master--a slightly camp figure, wonderfully played--offers to give Hero to a Union soldier, on the condition that the soldier guess Hero's current market value. The games are of course impossible, and the contracts fungible at the master's whim; still, Hero plays along. He finds himself affectively drawn to his master--or at least to the notion that he could have killed him, and failed to--as well as drawn into economic agency. He brings presents home for his fellow slaves--they've been sold or died, but no matter; he struggles mightily with the choice of whether to go to war (and win freedom) or not, but seemingly more concerned with this ethical choice as such than he is particularly convinced that his master will actually follow through with it.
There's a lot to this play--I'd like to try to see it again, and work some more of it out. I sometimes use "teachable" as a negative epithet; and, indeed, that play-disrupting discussion of the "marketplace" does nearly give the game away. But I'm already conniving to go through this with a group of undergraduates, in some context. Essential viewing in any event.
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