Yellowman (review)

In recent years, the delivery techniques and narrative structure of performance poetry, or spoken word, have infiltrated contemporary theatre, particularly in the works of black and Latino playwrights. This fruitful merging of performance poetry with theatre has its roots in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement and, more recently, a new home at the Nuyorican Poets Café and at New York's Universes. In Yellowman, playwright Dael Orlandersmith, a performance poet, employs this tradition of rhythmic style and presentational delivery of spoken word. Previous productions earned the play consideration as a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

As with Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck and Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, Yellowman explores the trauma of color/gender hierarchies inflicted on blacks by blacks. The two-person play hinges on the friendship and love between Alma (Orlandersmith) and her childhood friend Eugene (Howard W. Overshown)—two misfits of their insular South Carolina community. On one level, the play mirrors the typical romantic tragedy in which lovers are divided by their family heritage and loyalty. The play is a harsh, piercing revelation of the subjugation experienced by those who must live under rigid boundaries of color, gender, and class enforced within black communities. Alma was raised by a single mother who constantly relived her own trauma of being abandoned by her husband because of her dark skin. Eugene, performed with emotional intensity and precision by Overshown, is, on the other hand, a light-skinned, middle-class man. He is rejected and feminized by other dark-skinned men because of his pale skin and class status. The actors Orlandersmith and Overshown play a host of other characters, who emerge through Alma and Eugene's joint narration.

Yellowman is a study in memory and trauma. It opens with Alma, who recalls the trauma caused by the color/gender bind of intraracial discrimination. Orlandersmith's delivery illustrates the cadence and rhythms of slam poetry, as well as the conversational naturalism of narrative detail. Alma invokes the dark-skinned Southern women of the past who suffered even more intense discrimination because of their size, gender, and color. She imagines their oppression as a struggle for visibility—the right to see and to be seen. Mourning them and recalling their pleas for salvation, she tells the audience: "In heaven they would be seen/ loved/ not big/ ugly/ and black in heaven." The play moves between the narration and experience of Alma and Eugene's stories of color/gender oppression. The confessional and poetic tone of the play is further underscored by the direct address to the audience and the rare exchanges between Alma and Eugene.

The minimalist set designed by Klara Zieglerova consists of a ramp, two chairs, and photographic projections. It frames the confessions of the play as trans-historical and trans-geographic phenomena. The trauma of intraracial discrimination is always present whether in the recall of childhood insults or the contemporary struggle to survive. The absence of props and a sparse set highlight the power of memory and the trauma of history.

What is most striking and disturbing about Yellowman is its insinuation that oppression by blacks is more lethal and damaging than any system or practices inflicted by whites. By creating a closed world of black on black discrimination, Orlandersmith's play fails to reveal the larger structural and historical forces that maintain racial hierarchies among minority peoples. In one scene, Eugene recounts his racist, light-skinned maternal grandfather, after whom he is named, telling him that he must watch out for "darkassed Geechies" more so than white Southerners. These divisions appear impermeable though Alma and Eugene struggle to resist them. Alma fears being doomed to the resentment and loneliness of her mother for being big, black, and poor, as she begs Alma's father to acknowledge his daughter. Yellowman uses graphic accounts to examine the ways in which color divisions mark dark-skinned black women; it also evokes...