In Joy Ikekhua’s insightful reflection on School Girls: or, the African Mean Girls Play at Roundhouse Theater, they noted their discomfort with watching, in public, a play that exposed and explored painful scars endured by “Black” people that result from the effects of internalized ”white” supremacy.
School Girls focused primarily on “colorism,” which can manifest by “Black” people treating themselves and others of African heritage in absurd, cruel and sometimes self-destructive ways as they wrestle with the internalized value of whiteness being superior in every way.
Ikekhua notes that while the issues raised in this play were essential for “Black” people to acknowledge and confront, it was problematic that the majority of the audience that was seeing this play was ”white”, and that a lot of the exploration of these issues resulted in laughter from that majority ”white” audience.
These questions of who the intended or proper audience is, (as opposed to what audience shows up) for plays about “Black” people in the complexity of their humanity and what messages can, should and have been delivered to that audience are some the subjects confronted head-on by Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence, as it is here exquisitely and thoughtfully produced by Theater Alliance. The play raises questions about the lives of “white” people and the lives of “Black” people as performance. As part of that performance, the play also explores the policing of “Black” bodies in regards to their adherence to ”white” expectations of “Black” people, and the simultaneous invisibility, to the ”white” gaze, of the inherent humanity and divinity of those “Black” bodies.
As examined in this DCTS review, Day of Absence is a minstrel show. A minstrel show was a popular form of entertainment in the USA through the 19th century and much of the 20th century. It featured songs, dances and comic dialogue. It was primarily performed by ”white” actors in blackface. And it was intended to celebrate, reassure and reinforce ideas of the inferiority of “Black” people to ”white” people, thereby helping to justify “Black” people being treated as inferior to and by “white” people. Day of Absence is a minstrel show with a difference.
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When the audience enters the theater they are confronted with posters featuring the stereotypically exaggerated and distorted images of “Black” people that are typical of a minstrel show and that promise an evening of entertainment that will fulfill expectations and assure the reinforcement of a ”white” supremacist status quo. At the same time, however, the audience is surrounded by walls draped in a lush jewel box-like crimson colored cloth. We could be walking into a curio display of safely and carefully contained and curated artifacts for our perusal and consideration.
The minstrel show has a specific 3-part form consisting of Intro, Olio, and a skit or play proper. Co-directors Raymond Caldwell and Angelisa Gillyard, have “reclaimed” this form, providing us with an Intro that pointedly includes “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (also known as the Negro [here, Black] National Anthem, people of a certain age used to stand in respect when it was sung) numerous blackout acts for the Olio, and Douglas Turner Ward’s script, Day of Absence, as the skit or play proper. In Day of Absence, Mr. Ward turns the expectations we have of a minstrel show on its head and instead of having ”white” actors, as usual, depicting “Black” people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, care free and hypersexual, he has “Black” people portraying ”white” people, on what is, for them, a very bad day. These ”white” people are portrayed on a day on which the “Black” townspeople do not show up for work: do not show up to play their roles. The resultant behavior of ”white” people in the face of this disaster is, as one audience member described it, “hilarious,” as the distressed ”white” people in the town behave in absurd and cruel ways.
The evocative, poetic phrasing of the play’s title begs the question: Day of Absence, yes, but absence of whom and what? Certainly we are shown and we assume the title refers to the absence of the normally servile “Black” townspeople. But is anything else absent in this scenario? The “Black” townsfolk in “white” face play their “white” roles with exuberance, suggesting a freeing up of energy that is usually restrained. What restraint is absent?
Day of Absence closes November 3, 2019. Details and tickets
I, too, found the play hilarious and I laughed loudly and repeatedly. That laughter was freeing. I laughed at seeing some things that I had imagined or observed about ”white” people magnified and spoken out loud by someone else. I laughed in relief at not being subjected to a parade of stereotyped images that testified, in public, to the inferiority of “Black” people: I laughed in relief and pride at seeing the cleverness, resourcefulness, skill and sharp observation that the “Black” townspeople were able to bring to their performance of “whiteness.”
What happens when you have a day of absence from self-policing of your body and thoughts to make sure they are acceptable to the “white gaze” (So you don’t get corrected or shot)? What happens to you when, for 24 hours, you are able to experience yourself fully, on your own terms, without the filter of a white gaze? Does the preoccupation with code switching and performing for the white gaze in a gentrifying city sometimes make us “Black” people invisible to ourselves as well as our “white” co-habitants of this city? Do we sometimes also need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter? As Dr. Billy Taylor wrote in 1963, two years before Day of Absence was produced, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” (sung here by Nina Simone.)
When Day of Absence was first produced on a double bill with Happy Ending in November 1965, Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy had already been assassinated. And Lorraine Hansberry had died. But Nina Simone’s “To Be Young Gifted and Black” – the song that celebrated Ms. Hansberry’s life, distilling the meaning of that life for “Black” people, and a song that, when she performed it, Nina assured her “white” audience members “is not addressed primarily to “white” people, though it does not put you down in any way, it simply ignores you”- would not be released until 1969, the same year that a song which is featured pointedly in this production, James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” was produced.
The next year (1966) Joe Zawinul would write “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” and thereby bear witness that, indeed, it was not impossible for a non-“Black” person (Mr. Zawinul was Austrian) to acquire the courage and compassion necessary to see, know, experience and (without skepticism or academic distance) accept “Black” people as human: thereby giving us all a little more hope.
In post-performance discussion, Raymond Caldwell, co-director of this production, pointed out that there is a direct line from the minstrel show to current musical theater. We have been experiencing the long reach of minstrelsy and its acceptance, nay, embrace as the norm through the recent display in press and social media of ”white” people – and other not-so-dark peoples who have posed and performed in blackface and those who continue to see black face (and other non-white face) as an acceptable Halloween costume.
Palestinian and Zionist, “Black” American and “white American”, victim and perpetrator, indigenous person and colonizer: can we sit in the same room and listen to a story about where we have been hurt and where we have hurt? And when we do sit and listen, do we hear the same story?
