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  • Seeking a Fairer ViewSmashing Theatrical Mirrors in Contemporary Black Drama
  • Shane Breaux (bio)

“Hi, white people.”

—Jackie Sibblies Drury, Fairview

“Here I is; don’t you see me?”

—William Wells Brown, The Escape

Fairview, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s astounding 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning play, is part of a remarkable contemporary moment in U.S. theatre in which plays by many black playwrights are pushing against the stubbornly persistent form of American realism, resulting in some of the most innovative and even dangerous theatre in the country. Plays like Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris, A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson, What to Send Up When It Goes Down by Aleshea Harris, and Marys Seacole (Drury’s follow-up to Fairview), to name only a few, have all made for demanding theatrical experiences that challenge spectators by upending racial and theatrical conventions. These artists understand that theatrical mirrors are tools intended to reflect life as it is, and they also understand that anyone wielding these theatrical mirrors also holds tremendous power to affect social attitudes. Fairview ran at the Soho Rep and Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2018 in a production directed by Sarah Benson, which garnered a return engagement in Brooklyn at Theatre for a New Audience in 2019. Knowing that the play held unsettling surprises, I was shocked in seeing the production at how closely the first act adhered to a typical commercial U.S. play about middle-class families in domestic settings, turning on carefully guarded secrets and their eventual disclosure. But Drury’s play is anything but typical, and the play’s searing critique of race relations in America is grounded in the long and rich history of black theatre in the U.S. [End Page 75]

BLACK DRAMA IN THE U.S

In American theatre history, forms of racial mimicry and stereotyping, including minstrelsy, blackface, and representations of slavery, have affected and defined otherwise diverse groups of black people, reducing them to singular types. Black people have been represented and defined by the reflections of white desires and anxieties distorted by theatrical mirrors. But black theatre artists have been taking that mirror into their own hands for nearly two centuries. In 1821, William Alexander Brown opened the Grove Theatre in New York City, the first theatre to be owned by and feature black Americans. The troupe’s work was deemed so disruptive to theatrical representation and whiteness that they were arrested and detained for performing plays by William Shakespeare.1 Ever since, black theatre artists have been setting up and smashing racial stereotypes masquerading within theatre’s “authentic” representations to claim space for self-representation and self-actualization.

William Wells Brown continued these strategies with his landmark 1858 play The Escape; Or, A Leap for Freedom, the oldest extant play written and published by an African American. Wells Brown was a former slave, abolitionist lecturer, novelist, and playwright, and he also used theatre and performance for socio-political ends.2 He educated white audiences in the U.S. about the horrors of slavery and the need to abolish the peculiar institution by giving dramatic readings of his five-act play (performing all the roles himself) before shifting gears to give lectures on his lived experiences as a slave, and subsequent escape. He claimed in one lecture that slavery “has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” What could be represented, Brown believed, was the “system of Slavery,” doing so with The Escape and his lectures.3 The pathos and humor in his performances, not to mention his deft oratory skills, contributed to his popularity among white abolitionists (even though the play presents white people as both a terror and a necessary collaborator in ending that terror). Rather than writing a play about the physical, material, and psychological effects of chattel slavery, Brown attacked the institution itself by mirroring both white and black societies including slave owners, blackface minstrels, and white Quaker allies.

Wells Brown’s focus on the system of slavery, rather than on the day-to-day horrors and degradations of enslavement, is not unlike the way Drury’s Fairview approaches its subject matter. Fairview does not focus on the material effects...

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