Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (review)

At a time when our country is boiling over with cries of racial injustice, particularly against African American males, the Alliance Theatre’s production of Native Guardby former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey demonstrates that “Black lives matter.” This performance embodied untold memories of various injustices, including the murder of Trethewey’s mother, an African American woman, and the tumultuous race relations in Mississippi, while bringing the audience together as a community to address their own memories of inequity. They were able to explore these experiences through Trethewey’s writing against silence and by writing their own public recollection of the past.

Act 1 included the entire text of Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection Native Guard(2006), which tells of the poet’s personal memories, imagines her mother’s memories, and her nation’s memories. Act 2 featured an audience discussion led by a different community leader for each performance. All the poems were performed by January LaVoy (the Poet), except the titular “Native Guard” (which was performed by Neal Ghant). The Vocalist (Nicole Banks Long) sometimes sang the epigraphs or songs that introduced other poems. Projected image and phrases seen throughout the performance enhanced the text’s emphasis on the interaction between silence and the spoken word. This created an intimate experience between the audience and the actor as the projections visually represented Trethewey’s words: when the Poet described looking at a small rock in the stream, we could see a close-up view of the rock; when she was riding the train we saw what she viewed outside the window. These moments helped build community and connect the audience as we shared in the experience of the Poet.

The audience was an integral part of the performance. Upon entering the theatre I was welcomed by the Vocalist, with music director/pianist Tyrone Jackson performing Billie Holiday’s God Bless the Child. A variety of music was performed throughout the piece, setting the tone for each poem and even anticipating its emotion. Over-sized plush chairs and benches were provided for the audience, creating an inviting communal setting, which was surrounded by burlap-covered walls, thick with paper tags. Each audience member was given such a tag in their program and, during intermission, invited to write a statement inspired by the play and add it to the set. As each person participated in this communal ritual they stepped in the sand that covered the stage’s surface, leaving a tangle of overlapping footprints that linked the audience together into a single record.

At the beginning of act 2 the actors returned and sat with the audience in order to participate in a discussion with community leaders. The day that I attended, Chris Snell and Sarah Trowbridge, two librarians, led us in a very honest discussion about their memories of the South, which focused on racial discrimination. Ms. Snell, the Fayette library director, was from a town close to where Trethewey grew up in Mississippi. She described her experiences growing up there, and this encouraged others to reveal the many complexities of race relations that Trethewey’s work evoked in them. This exchange provided an opportunity for the audience to reflect and respond to any moments in our past where we had remained silent when faced with injustice. If her poems put texts in place of silence, then these written and spoken interactions allowed audience members to redeem their own silence, even if they could not to escape its consequences.

While the Poet spoke nearly all the text in the piece, the title poem was performed by Ghant, dressed as a Native Guard soldier, paying homage to the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, an African American army regiment that was forced to fight for the Confederate Union during the Civil War. “Native Guard” describes how the soldiers’ bodies were left to rot on the beach of Port Hudson, Louisiana, where their battle was fought. When Ghant as the Native Guard began the poem he emerged from the...