On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century

Talk Show

• • • TalkShow In the spring of 1990 , I saw an early version of Sally's Rape at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in conjunction with "The Decade Show." Most spectators that evening had been bused uptown from Soho's New Museum. Most were white. I can't ignore that observation in the context of Sally's Rape, deconstructed as it is to bring racial subtext to the surface. So there we were. White people. In Harlem. Bused. Listening to Robbie McCauley talk about her great-greatgrandmother Sally, who "had them chillun by the master like that's supposed to been something." Which is the kind of story most white people can handle. Horrific, but historic. Couldn't-happen-today. 1wasn 't-there. Except that Sally's Rape is about the way we live now. It's about the way such stories continue to shape black/white relationships because the past has never been dealt with. So, at the heart of Sally's Rape is the dialogue, the friendship, and the inexorable difference between McCauley and Jeannie Hutchins, "that white woman." In the words of a white spectator at the Harlem show: "1 don't know what that white woman was doing on the stage." Hutchins told me: "White people don't want me to be there. White people want to identify with Robbie." Robbie McCauley is an analyzer who thrives on intense conversation. Dialogue isn't just the heart of her work but her life. When I first wrote something about her in 1986, she criticized me for "not saying how you felt"-which was a bit startling at the time but became an opening to conversation. Since then I've heard her talk about others' criticisms of her, always with the attitude-is there a lesson in it? "Bearing witness about racism informs everything I do," she once told me. And racism Talk Show 201 continues to thrive because people do not talk about it-across racial lines. So she'll start the conversation. When the new full-length Sally's Rape: The Whole Story opens at the Kitchen this week, it becomes one of several current McCauley pieces about black/white dialogue. In my experience, it is white folks who participate reluctantly and nervously in such discussions, afraid to say something wrong, afraid to feel guilty. McCauley and Hutchins both recalled the Guilt Response they got the first time they performed Sally's Rape, in Boston, because it certainly wasn't the response they wanted. As Hutchins remembers it, a white woman stood up and told McCauley she felt terrible about "what we did to you." McCauley remembers: "I told her guilt wasn't useful. That pain was useful but that you had to go really into the pain. And she said she didn't think that was fair. And I said, 'Well, if I can go into it, you can.'" For white people, guilt is often the first thing that comes up, and it often stops them from going further. That's why a Clarence Thomas can use the word lynching and watch all the white guys back off. That can only happen in a country where issues of race are so unexamined. Plain speaking about race, between races, feels practically taboo. More familiar are platitudes from whites and rage from blacks. Most familiar of all is silence. McCauley tells me, "When you bring up racism, the first thing everyone says is 'I'm not one.' And that's the end of the conversation." After seeing Sally's Rape as a work-in-progress at three different venues , I began to develop a theory about how the piece gets around that defensiveness: What we first see of McCauley and Hutchins is their friendship, their easiness with each other. And because of this, I think, the white people in the audience drop their guard. So when McCauley suddenly steps back into moments from Sally's life, the don't-makeme -feel-guilty barriers are not in place. Then there's relief, as the piece moves back to the present, the equanimity of the friendship. Then the past intrudes again. White people always want these stories-pleaseto have some Hero Caucasians. But Hutchins is not a hero. Or a villain. She plays a regular white person. That's exactly what makes some white people uncomfortable. There's a moment in the piece when McCauley gets up on an auction [3.17.190.143] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 11:55...