Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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July 23, 2009
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Maybe I’m imposing the “current events” angle on this too much, but I began comparing the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. with Ma’s near-arrest by the Chicago police officer in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Here’s an excerpt from the play. Ma is being cited for assaulting a taxi driver:
MA RAINEY: Tell the men who he’s messing with!
POLICEMAN: Do you know this lady?
MA RAINEY: Just tell the man who I am! That’s all you gotta do.
POLICEMAN: Lady, will you let me talk, huh?
MA RAINEY: Tell the man who I am!
IRVIN: Wait a minute… wait a minute! Let me handle it. Ma, will you let me handle it?
MA RAINEY: Tell him who he’s messing with!
IRVIN: Okay! Okay! Give me a chance! Officer, this is one of our recording artists… Ma Rainey.
MA RAINEY: Madame Rainey! Get it straight! Madame Rainey! Talking about taking me to jail!
The “real” Ma Rainey was arrested several times herself, once for practicing illicit sexual relations with other women in a Chicago hotel room (she was bailed out by Bessie Smith, according to the story). In this fictional incident, she’s pretty clearly being profiled herself, in a time before that word really even existed. What made me think of Gates is the simple fact that they are both celebrities in their own right, and how being a celebrity or being well-off is—to a point—no protection from being singled out by law enforcement. The latest development of the story is that President Obama has now remarked upon it in a national press conference and condemned it, calling the police officer in question “stupid.” The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates has an interesting take on Obama’s perspective:
I was not so much surprised by Obama’s answer, as I was by his thinly-veiled anger. Anger may not be the right word, perhaps “perturbed.” After thinking about, I should not have been. Obama’s been pissed off before in public interactions.
Moreover, for black people, this is the kind of issue that tends to cut across lines of class and politics. I would say that this is the sort of thing that angers upper middle-class black people even more than it angers anyone else, because they tend to be individuals who, by society’s lights, are very accomplished. They deeply resent being lumped in with the mass. And more than anyone they resent the whole “when you’re black, you talk to the police like this” routine. Obama has lived as a member of that class for a large portion of his adult life, or he’s had some concentrated exposure to it—the black strivers roll deep on the South Side. It’s not shocking that he was pissed.
Coates doesn’t fault Obama for his privileged position, but I think he questions why this issue could only come to such prominence when it happened to a famous Harvard professor. In Wilson’s play, Ma Rainey is not of the upper middle-class, and despite her celebrity, she’s no celebrity to most white people in the 1920’s. Even if she thinks she deserves better treatment, I don’t think that, realistically, she expects that the cop is going to give it to her because of who she is. I suspect that she fights back only because she knows that Irvin and Sturdyvant, her white producers, can back her up (and ultimately, it’s Irvin’s bribe to the cop that gets her off the hook). Furthermore, Irvin and Sturdyvant protect Ma only insofar as it’s a means to continue making money off of her. Ma understands that she’s only temporarily renting fair treatment from the powerful.
I don’t want to diminish Professor Gates’s treatment, which was unfair and humiliating. However, that incident was followed by an outcry in the national media, an apology by the president of Harvard, and then a condemnation by the President of the United States. That kind of validation is hard to come by for most black Americans who find themselves the victims of racial profiling, especially when the discrimination is more subtle and hard to prove and isn’t followed by a front page New York Times story on their behalf. I think Obama said all the right things in his press conference answer by drawing out the necessary lessons of the incident, particularly in calling the history of law enforcement’s racial profiling a “fact” and pointing out “how race remains a factor in this society.” As a white man of fairly affluent upbringing, it’s easy for me to perceive sometimes that race isn’t a factor anymore, and maybe it takes the arrest of a university professor, a case literally close to home, to remind me otherwise.
July 23, 2009
Dramaturgy & August Wilson
Anastasia and I have been poring over a wealth of material for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—biographies on Ma, pre-histories of the blues (including minstrel and tent shows, the circuit from which Ma emerged), social conditions of black Chicago in the twenties, names and dates of the recording industry, etc. It’s easy to get lost in the research, but at the end of the day you have to discern what is really useful for the actors, the audience, the show. It’s also easy to forget that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is not a historical portrait or a sociological analysis, but the artistic expression of a singular imagination, August Wilson. I was reminded of this yesterday when our director, Ron, began to speak off the top of his head about August’s career and how Black Bottom rewrote the expectations of popular drama when it hit Broadway in 1984. The play is not about blues music but about people who play blues music, who live it and were born of it. Here’s August Wilson in a 1989 interview with Bill Moyers:
The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural responses of blacks in America to the situation that they find themselves in. Contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. You get the ideas and attitudes of the people as part of the oral tradition. This is a way of passing along information. If you’re going to tell someone a story, and if you want to keep information alive, you have to make it memorable so that the person hearing it will go tell someone else. This is how it stays alive. The music provides you an emotional reference for the information, and it is sanctioned by the community in the sense that if someone sings the song, other people sing the song. They keep it alive because they sanction the information it contains.
He’s talking about the blues, of course, but he could just as easily be describing his own cycle of plays, plays that seek to preserve the information or experience of African-American people in the twentieth-century in a compelling art form. It is an important choice that, like in the program for The Piano Lesson, we are devoting the limited space in our program not to historical background but to an oral record of August Wilson’s impact on the theater and its artists today.
July 22, 2009
Where are you going? Where are you coming from?
Luke Fields at UChiBLOGo has a good post about Olivia Gude’s deteriorating mural at 56th and Lake Park. I’ve passed it countless times without stopping to look at it, and I never realized that Gude created it by interviewing random passers by, transcribing their answers to two questions: “Where are you going? Where are you coming from?” It’s like an extremely low tech version of Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain in Millennium Park.
Photo: UChiBLOGo/University of Chicago Magazine
July 21, 2009
Rooftop Construction
When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be
And there the world below can’t bother me
Let me tell you now
When I come home feelin’ tired and beat
I go up where the air is fresh and sweet (up on the roof)
I get away from the hustling crowd
And all that rat-race noise down in the street (up on the roof)
On the roof, the only place I know
Where you just have to wish to make it so
Let’s go up on the roof (up on the roof)
At night the stars put on a show for free
And, darling, you can share it all with meI keep a-tellin’ you
Right smack dab in the middle of town
I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof (up on the roof)
And if this world starts getting you down
There’s room enough for two
Up on the roof (up on the roof)
Up on the roo-oo-oof (up on the roof)
Oh, come on, baby (up on the roof)
Oh, come on, honey (up on the roof)Everything is all right (up on the roof)
July 20, 2009
Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Forty years ago, an American man landed on the moon. But the French got there way before us:
That’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune, created in 1902 by Georges Méliès. It’s remarkable to see how film in the early century was produced in such a theatrical, proscenium-conscious paradigm. Méliès himself was a former stage magician at the Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris.
