Blissful Forbidden Theater Week!
How (sadly) becoming that this annual celebration of taboo performs has taken place (it ends at the moment) within the wake of Santa Monica School’s cancellation of all performances of a brand new play that takes slavery and racial reconciliation as its topic.
“By the River Rivanna” was written by G. Bruce Smith, a former journalist with whom I competed as a cub reporter a few years in the past once we each lined Oxnard’s metropolis authorities. Since then I’ve had solely informal contact with Smith, who served as SMC’s spokesman for a few years.
Opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
Smith emailed me a replica of the two-act play, which I after all devoured, in search of situations of racial insensitivity or a distasteful romanticization of slavery as his critics have charged.
What I discovered was a provocative story a couple of profitable, Ivy League-educated younger black man who has lengthy repressed his household’s traumatic slavery previous and begins to have disturbing goals about his Yoruba ancestors. He finds a diary, handed down in his household for generations, written by his enslaved great-great-great-grandmother who lived on the fictional Hope Plantation in Virginia within the 1850s. She is unhappily married to a person who has a sexual and, sure, romantic relationship with the plantation proprietor, who’s portrayed as deeply conflicted about slavery.
The play’s characters converse in a dialect that appears applicable to their locations in time and historical past. Over the course of many discussions whereas the play was being forged and rehearsed, Smith deleted a single use of the N-word as a result of it upset the white actor who would have spoken it. He additionally deleted the sound of a whiplash offstage. And two actors he forged—a black girl and a white man—dropped out due to the play’s content material.
The remaining scholar actors, Smith stated, “put their coronary heart and soul into it.”
Two weeks earlier than the primary of six performances was to happen on October 20, there was hassle. The play’s director, Perviz Sawoski, chair of the faculty’s theater arts division, was forwarded an electronic mail from a scholar offended that it was written by a white man and directed by a South Asian girl. “It is not their story to inform,” the coed wrote to a college administrator.
Faculty officers have been invited to rehearsals and met with the forged. My colleague Ashley Lee chronicled the difficult collection of occasions that led to the cancellation.
The underside line: As a substitute of letting folks watch the play and resolve for themselves what to assume, the SMC directors pulled the plug. In a means.
They orchestrated a vote of forged members, a few of whom, Smith stated, have been deeply shaken by the specter of protests and a plan to have campus police current on the first efficiency. Smith stated the campus police chief informed them that if protesters breached the stage throughout a efficiency, they may seize fireplace extinguishers to defend themselves.
“A few them stated they have been actually scared,” Smith stated. “I might inform by their faces that they have been increasingly more downcast.”
In a ultimate vote, 12 college students needed to carry out the play just for invited friends, and eight voted towards performing it in any respect.
“College students stated, look, if eight folks do not need to go on, we won’t do this present,” Smith stated. “For my part, that is what the administration needed: to show round and say, ‘It wasn’t us. It was the scholars.'”
The scholar council president issued an announcement quoted within the college newspaper, the Corsair, claiming the play “perpetuates problematic themes and discourse” by “centering white views and voices in telling a narrative of black experiences.”
Perhaps it does, possibly it would not. However how would she know if she had by no means seen it?
The Basis for Particular person Rights and Expression has accused SMC of violating the first Modification and Sawoski’s tutorial freedom. Directors have declined to remark, citing “the specter of litigation.”
The censorship impulse at each ends of the political spectrum is stifling discourse, vital considering and, certainly, the human spirit. As a author, I’ve to imagine in my bones that anybody can write about something.
“Porgy and Bess,” the grand — and sure, controversial — opera of 1935 was written by three white males (the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward) who insisted on an all-black forged, a radical transfer on the time. The work was as soon as described by James Baldwin as “a white man’s model of Negro life,” however would not you agree that the world is enriched by songs like “Summertime” or “I Loves You, Porgy”?
Mark Twain’s 1894 masterpiece, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is nothing if not a robust indictment of the evils of slavery, regardless of its repeated use of the N-word. Advised from a white viewpoint? Sure, however a superb and touching story nonetheless.
In 2021, Columbia College linguist John McWhorter, usually described as a black liberal, wrote “Woke Racism: How a New Faith has Betrayed Black America,” concerning the excesses of what he describes as “Third Wave Antiracism,” embodied within the work of writers and thinkers equivalent to Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. McWhorter lists a bunch of conflicting new guidelines for white those that stem from their work.
One appears notably applicable in mild of the destiny of “The River Rivanna”.
On the one hand, he writes, “you will need to attempt perpetually to know the experiences of black folks.” Then again, “you may by no means perceive what it’s to be black, and for those who assume you do, you’re a racist.”
Smith skilled this sort of dissonance from critics of his play: “On the one hand, they stated that the play romanticizes slavery. Then again, they stated that the whipping that we deleted was triggering or traumatic. So what was ?”
In 2012, Smith wrote “Coronary heart Mountain,” a play a couple of Japanese-American household imprisoned in a camp after the assault on Pearl Harbor. It was carried out at SMC with out incident and was chosen for the Kennedy Middle American School Theater Competition’s regional competitors.
“I feel issues have actually modified on school campuses,” Smith stated in maybe the understatement of the yr. “It has been actually eye-opening for me.”
