NT at Home part 9
Oct. 2nd, 2022 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficThese are the last of the non-Shakespeare plays on the service (until they add more). Only four plays left! (All of which I already know I don't really like.)
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Trouble in Mind
“Trouble in Mind” is a play by black playwright Alice Childress. It debuted off-Broadway in 1955, but did not make it to Broadway because producers felt it wasn’t palatable enough, which is deeply ironic given the content of the play.
It’s a play within a play. We open with Wiletta, a black actress who has made her way through the business by playing a slew of mammie roles and yessing every white person in the business. In the opening, a black man arrives, a new actor in his first show, and she lets him know the way things work—laugh at their jokes and say yes to whatever they say so they can feel superior.
Pretty soon you see this in action—the white director arrives and the black members of the cast immediately snap into “Uncle Tomming,” which the new actor accuses them of. The play they’re working on, though, is different. It’s about race. The director really wanted to say something. So he found a play about lynching by a white playwright, that centers two white characters, and has cast an assortment of old black theater hands to prostitute their own experiences of racism for this stereotyped farce.
This play was incredibly difficult to watch. The second act begins with them running a section of the play, and each of the black actors is hamming up the way black actors were expected to at the time. I’ve watched a lot of films from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and when black people appear at all it’s almost invariably awful. Watching a modern production portray what the actors at the time would have been expected to do is very, very cringe.
The play is full of moments of—I won’t even call microaggressions because they’re not micro. The director criticizes Wiletta’s acting, and asks her to imagine what a lynching would be like and act that, since he knows nobody here has actually seen a lynching. Then the older gentlemen on the cast says—he did. The director then asks him to share with the class because it will help them in their roles. It’s awful.
The main conflict comes from a moment where Wiletta, as the mother of the character that is lynched, tells him that the only thing to do is to give himself up. The director says she’s not speaking truth. You see her trying to say the line with truth—give up, give up, give up. The next day she explodes when asked to say that line, saying it’s a lie. Where are his people—his family would not give him up to be lynched. She cannot bring truth to something that is written as a lie to serve the white audience.
I can’t imagine what this would have been to watch at the time. Some things have changed, but many have not. I was especially struck by the way that these black actors, if they want to play something other than servants and mammies, will be expected to expose their deepest racial traumas. The director will not let them just perform anger—he keeps demanding that they say what they are angry about, even while he is very much not a person it is safe for the black actors to share their rage with.
The play hits hard, but oof.
“Master Harold”…and the Boys
“Master Harold”…and the Boys is a play about a 17-year-old white South African (Master Harold) and the two much older black men who work at his mother’s tea shop (the boys). It was written by Athol Fuggard, himself a white South African, and was deeply autobiographical. The play, set in 1950, is attempting to show the small dehumanizations of apartheid.
The action of the play takes place over one afternoon at the tea shop, where it is raining so heavily no customers come in. Sam and Willy are preparing for a ballroom dance competition. Harold has to do his schoolwork. We soon realize that Harold’s homelife is awful—his father is an abusive alcoholic who lost his leg in the war, and Harold is forced to caretake for him. He has therefore always escaped into the black quarters, where Sam has been a surrogate father to him. The thing is, though—every interaction shows that Harold feels an inherent superiority, and that he is fundamentally incapable of recognizing suffering beyond his own.
Over the course of the play, Harold learns that his father is coming home from the hospital, meaning a resumption of the abuse, and since he can’t lash out at his father, he lashes out at the black men instead, culminating in him spitting in Sam’s face. This detail is apparently also autobiographical.
I mostly felt that this was a play whose time has passed. It’s meant to show you how awful apartheid is. Right—I agree. Apartheid was awful. And is over. I don’t need to be convinced of this. Also, I found Harold unwatchably vile from end to end when I think I’m supposed to identify with him. And, as a note for this production, I don’t know what accent the actor playing Harold was doing, but it wasn’t a white South African accent.
I mean, you pretty much know what you’re getting when you hear the summary of the play. Would you like to watch a white child be vile to black people under apartheid? Well, here you go.
East Is East
The Guardian called East Is East a “culture-clash comedy.” Umm…no? This is a 1996 play made into a 1999 movie about a family in 1971 whose patriarch is Pakistani (though he says, when he left, it was India) and whose matriarch is British. There are seven children—the eldest never appears—which meant I spent much of the play not being able to keep track of who was who. The fact that everyone referred to the father as “me dad” even when talking to siblings also threw me. (I would only say “my dad” when talking to someone outside the family. To my brother, I’d say “dad.”)
The first action of the play is that the father, George, finds out his youngest son isn’t circumcised and demands that he be circumcised now. Later on, the children find out the father has agreed to marry two of his sons off to women in Pakistan they’ve never met. Different of the children react differently to their authoritarian father—some rebel, some conform, one dissolves into mental illness.
Any comedy that can be derived, though, is undercut by the father’s abuse. There are several times where he violently beats his wife or one of his children. And then the play ends with a, what can you do, I love him, shrug about it.
This play and movie seem to hold a role in bringing Pakistani culture more into the British eye, but I have to say. The play frames everything Pakistani as backwards and violent. The British mother is doing her best in the face of a controlling, abusive husband. This is not framed as a conflict between equally valid cultures. It is framed as a man from a regressive culture lashing out as his loved ones don’t want to continue with tradition. So that’s an ehhhhhh from me.
A Taste of Honey
I watched this the day after getting a COVID booster, so I fell asleep the first time through then had to rewind and watch again. I did not like this play. Everyone had very thick Northern accents that I had a hard time understanding, there was a lot of shouting, and it’s three hours long.
The play is about Jo, an eighteen-year-old, who has gotten pregnant by a black sailor who promised to marry her but hasn’t been back. She shacks up instead with a gay man. Her mother is also around, and marries an abusive alcoholic. That’s it. That’s all that happens. There’s a lot of arguing and yelling—people’s emotions ping pong around with little motivation. Scenes go on and on with no goal or direction.
Reading up about it, I discovered three things: 1 – This is the most produced play by a British woman; 2 – the movie version contains the first film interracial kiss (yes, it beats Star Trek); and 3 – the author was 19 when she wrote this.
This makes me think this gained traction at the time because it was SHOCKING—interracial relationship! Unwed mother! Gay man! And so was produced because it was PROVOCATIVE. But I don’t actually think there’s a there there. Yes, it has those things, but I’m not sure it has anything to say about them. The play ends with Jo going into labor, telling her mother the baby will be black, and the mother walking out. The end. Not only no resolution to anything, it also didn’t build to any sort of coherent climax. Stuff just happened. So I’d say give this a miss.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Trouble in Mind
“Trouble in Mind” is a play by black playwright Alice Childress. It debuted off-Broadway in 1955, but did not make it to Broadway because producers felt it wasn’t palatable enough, which is deeply ironic given the content of the play.
It’s a play within a play. We open with Wiletta, a black actress who has made her way through the business by playing a slew of mammie roles and yessing every white person in the business. In the opening, a black man arrives, a new actor in his first show, and she lets him know the way things work—laugh at their jokes and say yes to whatever they say so they can feel superior.
Pretty soon you see this in action—the white director arrives and the black members of the cast immediately snap into “Uncle Tomming,” which the new actor accuses them of. The play they’re working on, though, is different. It’s about race. The director really wanted to say something. So he found a play about lynching by a white playwright, that centers two white characters, and has cast an assortment of old black theater hands to prostitute their own experiences of racism for this stereotyped farce.
This play was incredibly difficult to watch. The second act begins with them running a section of the play, and each of the black actors is hamming up the way black actors were expected to at the time. I’ve watched a lot of films from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and when black people appear at all it’s almost invariably awful. Watching a modern production portray what the actors at the time would have been expected to do is very, very cringe.
The play is full of moments of—I won’t even call microaggressions because they’re not micro. The director criticizes Wiletta’s acting, and asks her to imagine what a lynching would be like and act that, since he knows nobody here has actually seen a lynching. Then the older gentlemen on the cast says—he did. The director then asks him to share with the class because it will help them in their roles. It’s awful.
The main conflict comes from a moment where Wiletta, as the mother of the character that is lynched, tells him that the only thing to do is to give himself up. The director says she’s not speaking truth. You see her trying to say the line with truth—give up, give up, give up. The next day she explodes when asked to say that line, saying it’s a lie. Where are his people—his family would not give him up to be lynched. She cannot bring truth to something that is written as a lie to serve the white audience.
I can’t imagine what this would have been to watch at the time. Some things have changed, but many have not. I was especially struck by the way that these black actors, if they want to play something other than servants and mammies, will be expected to expose their deepest racial traumas. The director will not let them just perform anger—he keeps demanding that they say what they are angry about, even while he is very much not a person it is safe for the black actors to share their rage with.
The play hits hard, but oof.
“Master Harold”…and the Boys
“Master Harold”…and the Boys is a play about a 17-year-old white South African (Master Harold) and the two much older black men who work at his mother’s tea shop (the boys). It was written by Athol Fuggard, himself a white South African, and was deeply autobiographical. The play, set in 1950, is attempting to show the small dehumanizations of apartheid.
The action of the play takes place over one afternoon at the tea shop, where it is raining so heavily no customers come in. Sam and Willy are preparing for a ballroom dance competition. Harold has to do his schoolwork. We soon realize that Harold’s homelife is awful—his father is an abusive alcoholic who lost his leg in the war, and Harold is forced to caretake for him. He has therefore always escaped into the black quarters, where Sam has been a surrogate father to him. The thing is, though—every interaction shows that Harold feels an inherent superiority, and that he is fundamentally incapable of recognizing suffering beyond his own.
Over the course of the play, Harold learns that his father is coming home from the hospital, meaning a resumption of the abuse, and since he can’t lash out at his father, he lashes out at the black men instead, culminating in him spitting in Sam’s face. This detail is apparently also autobiographical.
I mostly felt that this was a play whose time has passed. It’s meant to show you how awful apartheid is. Right—I agree. Apartheid was awful. And is over. I don’t need to be convinced of this. Also, I found Harold unwatchably vile from end to end when I think I’m supposed to identify with him. And, as a note for this production, I don’t know what accent the actor playing Harold was doing, but it wasn’t a white South African accent.
I mean, you pretty much know what you’re getting when you hear the summary of the play. Would you like to watch a white child be vile to black people under apartheid? Well, here you go.
East Is East
The Guardian called East Is East a “culture-clash comedy.” Umm…no? This is a 1996 play made into a 1999 movie about a family in 1971 whose patriarch is Pakistani (though he says, when he left, it was India) and whose matriarch is British. There are seven children—the eldest never appears—which meant I spent much of the play not being able to keep track of who was who. The fact that everyone referred to the father as “me dad” even when talking to siblings also threw me. (I would only say “my dad” when talking to someone outside the family. To my brother, I’d say “dad.”)
The first action of the play is that the father, George, finds out his youngest son isn’t circumcised and demands that he be circumcised now. Later on, the children find out the father has agreed to marry two of his sons off to women in Pakistan they’ve never met. Different of the children react differently to their authoritarian father—some rebel, some conform, one dissolves into mental illness.
Any comedy that can be derived, though, is undercut by the father’s abuse. There are several times where he violently beats his wife or one of his children. And then the play ends with a, what can you do, I love him, shrug about it.
This play and movie seem to hold a role in bringing Pakistani culture more into the British eye, but I have to say. The play frames everything Pakistani as backwards and violent. The British mother is doing her best in the face of a controlling, abusive husband. This is not framed as a conflict between equally valid cultures. It is framed as a man from a regressive culture lashing out as his loved ones don’t want to continue with tradition. So that’s an ehhhhhh from me.
A Taste of Honey
I watched this the day after getting a COVID booster, so I fell asleep the first time through then had to rewind and watch again. I did not like this play. Everyone had very thick Northern accents that I had a hard time understanding, there was a lot of shouting, and it’s three hours long.
The play is about Jo, an eighteen-year-old, who has gotten pregnant by a black sailor who promised to marry her but hasn’t been back. She shacks up instead with a gay man. Her mother is also around, and marries an abusive alcoholic. That’s it. That’s all that happens. There’s a lot of arguing and yelling—people’s emotions ping pong around with little motivation. Scenes go on and on with no goal or direction.
Reading up about it, I discovered three things: 1 – This is the most produced play by a British woman; 2 – the movie version contains the first film interracial kiss (yes, it beats Star Trek); and 3 – the author was 19 when she wrote this.
This makes me think this gained traction at the time because it was SHOCKING—interracial relationship! Unwed mother! Gay man! And so was produced because it was PROVOCATIVE. But I don’t actually think there’s a there there. Yes, it has those things, but I’m not sure it has anything to say about them. The play ends with Jo going into labor, telling her mother the baby will be black, and the mother walking out. The end. Not only no resolution to anything, it also didn’t build to any sort of coherent climax. Stuff just happened. So I’d say give this a miss.