Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014

It has been two years since the last mention in these pages of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, held each July at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But I had a chance to see it in 2013 as well, and again this year. This year broke from earlier patterns. The saying goes that if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. Shepherdstown had a mostly winning formula; I’m not sure the tampering was a good thing.

The underlying model has not changed: CATF stages five legitimate dramas with small casts by contemporary American playwrights. The casts are largely interlocked, so that there is in effect one small company presenting five shows. But this year CATF did a couple of things differently. In each of the two previous years, there had been one play by a big name (Neil LaBute in 2012, Sam Shepard in 2013) and four plays by lesser-known playwrights. And I thought in each of those years that the big-name plays were the runts of very strong litters. This year, there were no big names, and in a departure from former practice, of the five playwrights, three were African American, and in addition the “company” was predominantly African American. And, sad to say, there were only two real successes among the plays and two failures—although I should hasten to add that both success and failure here were color blind: black and white playwrights numbered equally at both ends of the quality range. The acting of course was superb, as always at Shepherdstown, regardless of race.

Nonetheless, race was a constant undercurrent at this year’s edition, and one worth addressing explicitly. And let me start with what may be paradoxical, in light of the things I have just said: it was striking how unstriking the un-whiteness of the casts often was. There still exist certain irrational assumptions at the back of our theater-going minds, whether we like it or not. One is that the default setting for any character is white, and that if the part (and hence usually the actor) is anything else, there must be a reason for it, while no reason is required to make a character white.

Yet in one of these plays, Charles Fuller’s One Night, a play about our military—an institution which seems to have attained the greatest color-blindness of any in our society—the script says (with justification) that the characters can be “of any color or ethnic group.” What dictated the racial composition of the Shepherdstown cast for this play, then, was the more race-specific casting in other plays coupled with the need to limit the size of the overall company. In consequence, despite the race of its author and that of most of its cast, the play simply was not about race, and could have been written or played by anyone.

Instead, One Night was about the complex of issues surrounding rape in the military. This is a huge and important subject and we need dramas about it. And one of the many reasons it is an important subject is that it often brings lifelong consequences in its train. But these things must be handled carefully. The act of rape itself and the consequences of rape are inherently melodramatic, and a playwright must take care not to overplay them. Too much melodrama can distract attention from the subject to the treatment of the subject, and not in a good way. And that unfortunately appears to have happened in One Night.

I remarked, when I wrote of CATF 2012, that it seemed to have been drilled into contemporary playwrights that the de rigeur form of exposition is the revelation of the characters’ secrets. That standard operating procedure is on full display here.

There is nothing wrong with making a secret at the outset the rape of Alicia G, the former servicewoman at the center of the play (Kaliswa Brewster), since rape is the kind of thing a victim might wish to conceal, even as her life...