The city is white. The strand is white. The sky is blue paler than the ocean is blue.
The sail that just broke the horizon is white. It’s white, right? Tell me it’s white.
The king will tell you The same damned thing: You are the king. We are… everything.
The sail is black. It’s always been black, going all the way back. It’s black
*
“Evil” is a shorthand: a convenient knot on a string Every day we dress the children in white cotton for the king.
We say, “children”, but we mean something else, surge of protein: most will survive. When was the last sail you’ve seen that wasn’t white?
It’s white, right?
The sail is white. The sail is white. And life is woven light. Monsters are movies. Life is mood.
Face down on the sand is a what not a who.
And whos that are whats are food.
*
Your heart is a labyrinth where the minotaur lives. The bull-king's heart is weak and wormy, compromised by compromise. But this is only what must be because this is what you want. You're free.
*
You cannot be forgiven. I cannot be absolved. Ours hearts are ash, lungs saltwater, and stomachs stuffed with children seethed in belief.
Our labyrinth is formed in curves not angles. That singing is sirens, not angels. All the forever we’ve lost is now.
This week I started my new job working for the City of Seattle, Department of Transportation (aka SDOT). This coming Sunday evening, I’ll be reading a story I wrote called “Exit Interview” about getting laid off from my old job. At the time I conceived it, the plot was mere imagination, but I knew the ax would eventually fall. Additionally, the story morphs into being about the end of my life, and then, more eventually still, about the end of the world. And again, I used my imagination but I have a pretty good general idea of how these things will go.
So why am I reading this story on Sunday evening (with the help of the truly excellent Brandon Simmons)? And why, in support of Bernie Sanders campaign to become the next president of the United States of America?
So many think he doesn’t have a chance. Others think he’s inured to the injustice of American racism, puffed up on a cloud of clueless White progressivism.
What do you think?
Do you think he has a chance to become our next president?
Here’s my suggestion: use your imagination; because like me— like all of us— you have a pretty good idea of what will happen otherwise.
Well over a month ago my good friend Bob Williams posted something on Face Book that set me back on my heels and caused me to realize that back when I was doing theatre, and most specifically, when I was sitting at the casting table, I often did not pay close enough attention to the biases of the people making the decisions, myself especially.
Bob has been a dear friend and treasured collaborator since we first started hanging out and doing improv together at the University of Maryland back in the mid-1980’s. He’s been a cast member of some of my favorite productions of my plays, including Annex Theatre’sAn American Book of the Dead – The Game Show and “White Boy can Take a Punch” in Brown Box Theatre’s Hoodie’s Up. Bob’s a terrific actor and a deeply generous person and not exactly known for living on a soap box (unlike some of us - *cough*). So I feel strongly that his words deserve special attention and bear repeating. To that end, I asked Bob if I could republish his Face Book post here atJust Wrought, and he kindly acceded. Part of me is sorry it took me so long to get this up on my blog, the other part isn’t sorry at all, since it’s good sometimes to reemphasize a call to action that may have been otherwise quickly forgotten.
My main Point last night at the forum on artistic freedom and artistic responsibility at the Seattle Rep was that, 50 years after the civil rights act removed the signs that told us that Black people were Colored and White people were not, no color at all,(What if the signs said "Black" and "Bleached"?) we still have a culture that normalizes White as neutral, or of no particular ethnicity. And that informs how we cast roles in the arts community and how we see ourselves as a people.
If a White actor is seen as ethnically neutral, they can play anybody. And non Whites are only seen as their ethnicity. A White guy can play everyman and I can only play Black man, and if a writer does not specify an ethnicity for a character, the default setting is to see that character as White, straight, able bodied, Christian. Should the actor with an eye patch only show up for pirate roles?
Two guys walk into a bar...
What color are they? Did one of them use the ramp to enter?
Our default cultural setting says "White unless specified as other."
After all I didn't say two Asian guys walked into a bar.
So many people in the Bagley Wright Theater last night are tired of being the other. And we are getting tired of explaining how it is still employed, or having to explain that it still exists.
This is how you get Jake Gyllenhal as the Prince of Persia and the Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.
Or Matthew Broderick as Simba, King of the plains of Africa, and Jeremy Irons as his uncle.
It's this rich history that in no small part brought us to The Mikado controversy, and brought all of us to the forum last night.
White people can be anything (even Japanese), our shared culture tells us that.
Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us a template:
Abandon a White baby in the jungles of Africa. Now come back 20 years later and where's that baby? Anywhere he pleases. He's Tarzan, King of the whole damn place.
And the IMDB page for this second animated feature Disney chose to set in Africa,(Disney's Tarzan) Has a sea of White headshots on the cast listing. (Seriously, go look.)
If you are producing this "2 Guys in a Bar" play are you open to guys of different ethnicities? Do either of them have to be a guy? Can two PEOPLE walk into a bar? Do they both have to walk?
Mostly I wanted to show the room these two photos, taken Saturday at the lower Queen Anne Bartell's drugstore, a couple hundred yards from where we had gathered. Aisle 12: Ethnic care.
And the products on Aisle 12 in the other shot. How many ethnicities are represented in the ethnic care aisle? Where should I look for soap, Ethnic cleansing? (Seriously, go look. Take your time, it will still be there. Aisle 12.)
White/Colored, Ethnic/ non ethnic, how far have we really come?
Thanks Kathy Hsieh for calling on me and facilitating a discussion. Thanks Annie Lareau for showing us how it can be done right. Thanks Andy Jensen for reminding us all that not every family looks the same and thanks Pamala Mijatov for making Annex one of the places where these issues don't flare up, and for reminding us what a local treasure Courtney Meaker is.
I'm getting older, and I'm getting tired of walking some of my White brothers and sisters through the baby steps of "Your people aren't the only people that are people."
An essay called “The Uses of Art” has generated a lot of traffic here at Just Wrought in the three and a half years since I posted it.1 I’m not sure why it’s so popular, maybe because it’s short and quick and has the kind of easily scannable list that’s very attractive on the internet these days. I’m still quite proud of the piece, even though I should probably admit now that I just sort of tossed it off from accumulated old notes. Recently, however, my thoughts have gone in a converse direction, towards those employments we generally assume art can be put to that it really can’t, or at least not very well: the misuses of art. A few months ago I began brain-brewing a list (by no means complete):
Persuade through rationality
Sell itself
Self-evaluate
Maintain objectivity2
Manage its own knee-jerk radicalism
Recognize its own inborn conservatism
Successfully proselytize for any particular religion or political party
Ms. Jolie’s piece in The New York Times echoed for me with a play I wrote a few years ago about the race to decode the human genome, thus gaining access to all sorts of new information which we now have to face with sober eyes.
KELLIE: . . . You discovered the Breast Cancer Gene.
FRANCIS: The BRCA 1 sequence. Helped to discover. Yes.
KELLIE: My mom died of breast cancer.
FRANCIS: I’m sorry to hear that.
KELLIE: Ashkenazi Jew.
FRANCIS: Then you must know Ashkenazi Jew’s are several times more likely to develop the mutation
KELLIE: Yup. And if they have it they face an 80% to 90% chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes, particularly at a young age. And you must know that some women who test positive—and I can’t say as I blame ‘em—elect to under go prophylactic mastectomy.
FRANCIS: Yes I do know that. May I ask: have you tested for the sequence?
“You haven't shown any sign at all of respecting what I have to say or even wanting to hear it. I'm not gonna go stand under that safe.”
This from a gun-loving former Facebook friend in response to my invitation to join an on-stage conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. I actually get this sort of response frequently from gun lovers, because whenever they come trolling at my virtual door with whatever twisted logic their addiction has tortured them into accepting, I always invite them to join a future evening of theatre that I am planning, so they can put their counterfeit rationalist money where their soon-to-be-no-longer-virtual mouth is. I think the reason for their reluctance is related to something I touch upon in an explanation I posted here on Just Wrought about why I delete cloaked commenters:
…I know it's considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one's words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won't be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!
What’s particularly disappointing in the case of my gun loving former Facebook friend is that he’s an experienced— and damned talented— actor. Therefore he lacks the excuse offered by so many other trolls who claim that I have the advantage of them onstage, being show folk myself. (I suspect my friend may also belongs to that vast majority of performers who believe, sadly, that the world owes them their next show, instead of vice-versa.)
In the past few years I have produced or been a part of quite a bit of theatre that deals with the immediate and difficult issues of our times, especially involving gun violence. I’m deeply proud, for instance, that my short play “White Boy Can Take a Punch” was part of last May’s magnificently uplifting offering, Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays. My Living Newspaper production company, NewsWrights United also covered one of Puget Sound’s most egregious gun massacres in our second edition, The New New News, staging the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons after he murdered four cops in cold blood.
Here’s what I learned from the above experiences: theatre is one of the safest places to explore the implications of real life tragedy. As uncomfortable, challenging, frustrating, even humiliating, sometimes boring, often righteously indignant or unrelentingly Leftist as theatre can be, it is also uniquely illuminating, uplifting, life-affirming and much more respectful of our many differences as citizens than nearly any other communications framework I can think of.
So my friend who claims to be so worried about the Acme safe falling on his head also knows that according to the rules of his Looney Tunes metaphor, if such should befall him in a theatre, he would instantly be able to open his eyes, stand up, dust himself off and again join his battle against his wrong-headed road runner adversaries. So he’s bluffing, essentially. My friend doesn’t really want to avoid danger, or even pain. No, he’s too much of a gun-toting tough guy to want to spare himself those risks. What he wants to avoid is humiliation. And no one who steps into the theatre for a conversation can be guaranteed to duck that. Audiences are can be harsh, and humiliation, along with its nobler twin, humility, are deeply woven into the fabric of what we offer, and what we receive in return. If one seeks, at all costs, to avoid disgrace, then one is wise to always avoid the stage, and not just when it is serving in its noble capacity as a crucible for societal discourse.
But here’s my ultimate question for my friend, and for anyone who holds the doomed gun advocate’s position: given that humiliation is an unavoidable risk of wider life, isn’t it wiser still to serve yourself an inoculation of it in the safe space that art offers? Otherwise, aren’t you running the risk, out in the big scary world beyond, of being more tempted to “protect” your point of view with that all-too-deadly, non-cartoon gun you’re clutching?
Some say Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was the first to proclaim, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Others say it might have been Göring or Himmler.* One thing’s for sure: once one Nazi blurted the banality, it didn’t take long for the rest of them to parrot it. Originality and wit were never hallmarks of the Third Reich. Some years later, the English satirist Malcom Muggeridge did what English satirists do best, and turned brown-shirted thuggery on its head: “When I hear the word ‘gun’, I reach for my culture.” And in case you were wondering, that’s what America needs to do next.
The United States has now fully entered the long reaping season that our gun addiction has sown. We have watched in paralyzed horror from Columbine through Virginia Tech through the Café Racer massacre, mere blocks away from my own house in Seattle, right up to and through the seemingly ultimate abomination that was the Newtown Tragedy. I say “seemingly ultimate” because we all know Newtown will not be the end, but rather only a particularly vicious chapter somewhere in the middle of a book we seemed doomed to keep writing.
I have occasionally over-indulged myself with ranting on Facebook about this national sickness, and I have almost always regretted it. Gun-loving friends (and not-such-friends) prefer to shrug and pout, posture and taunt, flicking out comebacks like, “What are you going to do? Pass a law? You think that'll help? Good luck.” Until now I haven’t had the time, inclination or clarity to properly respond. But here goes:
No, I have limited interest in politics per se. Political solutions are necessary but not sufficient. As the gun-addicts love to remind (and threaten) us, outlawing handguns and assault rifles will merely turn gun-addicts into outlaws. (I am personally okay with that, by the way. Addicts need to find bottom.) We have to go deeper than politics to change our entire society. That’s where art comes in. Art can do all sorts of things that politics can never— and should never— hope to. Artists can and must, analyze, prophesy, seduce, synthesize, convince, cajole, ridicule, probe, scour, purge, alienate, repatriate and heal. To make that short list shorter, we must employ all the uses of art to win our country back from this insanity. We must surround the sickness with non-violent culture, like a healthy white blood cell engulfing and dissolving a pathogen.
I’ll be posting more essays as part of a larger conversation about how art can be key to disintegrating America’s gun cult. I am a playwright primarily, so mostly I am brainstorming potentialities of theatre, but I am equally eager to hear anyone and everyone’s thoughts on other creative tactics. Including gun-lovers. I love you too, sick and frightened as you are. I encourage you to join the conversation that will lead to your rehabilitation and your country’s ultimate recovery.
Now that we have thanked the men and women who have served and continue to serve in our nation’s military, it is appropriate that we give deep thought to how can make their service obsolete.
Nearly all nations have soldiers, but not all nations are free. Having a great military does not make us a great nation. Only a nation worth fighting for can consecrate the sacrifice of those who give their lives and take the lives of others in our name. The poets, the thinkers, the artists, and indeed, all the citizens must exercise the freedoms that others have fought for, or the fighting— stop— let us call it what it is: the killing and dying— will truly all have been in vain.
Let the United States of America not aspire to be the greatest military power in the world. We have already reached this questionable goal. Let us aspire instead to make military might unnecessary, and indeed, as unthinkable and anathematic as slavery is now.
Nobody in the last fifty years has gone to live theatre to kill time like they would slip into a cineplex. Nobody has sat and blankly watched theatre like they would TV because they don’t have anything better to do. There is always something better to do. People go to the theatre because they hope—more often than not against their better judgment—that what they will experience there will change them, open them up, break down some poisoned part of them, help them live with some unbearable pain, give them more hope. People who go to the theatre are frequently disappointed.
Tyrone Brown asked me to share with my colleague Sharon Williams the honor of giving the curtain speech at tonight’s sole performance of Hoodies Up!, a series of short plays inspired by the Trayvon Martin tragedy. Tyrone surely intends for us to keep our remarks exquisitely brief and practical tonight, but as I started thinking about it my brain, as it is sometimes wont to do, erupted in about five different directions. These moments of mind spasm are, in part, why I created Just Wrought: that is, to spare everyone me blathering on at curtain speeches and the like. Here’s what I won’t be saying tonight:
My reason for joining the Hoodies Up! writers team can be boiled down into one word: selfishness. I wanted to work with Tyrone Brown, a director whom most folks in the “Seattle theatre know” recognize as a coming powerhouse. I wanted to write for African American actors, a chance as rare as hen’s teeth in the Pacific Northwest and, sadly, in the nation at large. I wanted to tell a story I had never publically told before, from a time in my life that I cherish. All good selfish reasons. (When I start doing theatre for non-selfish reasons let’s all start worrying, okay?)
Hermann Göring famously declared, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Nazism at its nastiest, and most honest. Fascists hate art and anything else they don’t understand, or that causes people to prick their ears up and say, “Whoa! What’s going on?” Of course, there’s a simple syllogistic trick that flips fat-headed Göring on his ear: “When I hear the world ‘gun’ I reach for my culture.” That’s what Tyrone did when he began processing the Trayvon tragedy, and that’s what the writers he invited did in turn, and then in turn the actors and directors. Tonight it’s your turn: the audience, the final hopeful piece of this hope-against-reason puzzle. Tonight, when you come watch Hoodies Up! you’ll be reaching for your culture, and countering the insidious icon of the gun that holds America mesmerized. You will be taking the risk of being bored, confused, annoyed and generally disappointed, but you will have chosen hope over every empty and utterly logical reason why you shouldn’t have bothered.
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