PHILIP LERMAN
GUEST WRITER
With the first previews of Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation starting on the Bratton stage this weekend, there’s a great opportunity for me to explore, once again, a question I’ve pondered often over the years:
How does a White guy watch a Black play? Let me say right from the start that I was never a theater kid. The closest I got to Broadway as a child was when our parents took us once to Radio City to see the Rockettes. I did watch all the musicals that had been turned to movies that wound up on the Early Show at 4 p.m. when I got home from school: Bye Bye Birdie, The Music Man, Guys and Dolls, and the like. I never really encountered theater that explored the Black experience until I married a woman on the board of Playwrights Horizons, an off-Broadway theater in New York, and started seeing folks on stage who didn’t look like me.
Sometimes, it was enlightening. Sometimes, it was, to be frank, uncomfortable. But often, there was something familiar about it. It was when the play took the funny – and fraught – Form of satire. Just like the play we’re about to see.
Chautauqua Theater Company Guest Artist Sharina Martin, as Undine.
Because that’s something I know something about.
As a Jewish kid, I was in love with all the Jewish comics who satirized our life: Allan Sherman, who far beyond “Hello Muddah Hello Faddah” became famous for poking fun at ourselves. Or my dad’s favorite, Jackie Mason, who spoke in a Yiddish accent and did hilarious riffs on stereotypes of Jewish life (along the lines of, “I don’t think that guy is Jewish. He bought his wife a fur coat and didn’t get it wholesale. He paid retail. What kind of Jew does that?”) We loved laughing at those jokes in my house – but it was another story when the non-Jews in the neighborhood parroted those lines.
Because somehow, we knew we were using humor to get to a deeper truth about the underlying values and beliefs we had about ourselves, our heritage, our struggles. But when the Italian and Irish kids in the neighborhood repeated those jokes, we know they were using them to belittle us, to demean us, to make us look foolish. It’s like the other kids were saying, “Hey, you don’t want us to make fun of Jewish stereotypes – but if you can do it, why can’t we?”
Why indeed.
Those are the thoughts that troubled me two years ago, when the play Black Like Me was presented on stage here. It was another play with all Black actors in front of an almost all- White audience. Although it was a serious play, there were moments – as some of you may have heard — when some in the audience felt that that they could laugh at the actors on stage, and some asked inappropriate questions during the talkback. And those actors told us they felt shocked, hurt, and betrayed by a community that had promised to be open and welcoming.
Perhaps reflecting on what happened then can help us better understand how to approach the play that’s about to open. Because as a White guy I can’t pretend to know what those actors were going through; but I do know what it’s like when we bear our own pain in front of others – in the form of humor, or drama, or whatever. It’s an open and vulnerable moment. And we can only hope that those in the audience who are different from us will approach our openness with respect.
So that’s how I hope to approach Fabulation. The play, acted as a broad satire, tells the story of a rich Black woman whose money is stolen from her, and who is forced to move back with the poor family she left behind. That family is played for laughs, at first, and certainly deals in stereotypes – starting with the grandma addicted to heroin, the father addicted to playing the lottery, and the various other characters who inhabit the poor neighborhood where much of the action takes place.
I consider it an honor to have that play presented here. And to have the great Lynn Notttage, the only woman playwright to win the Pulitzer twice, in attendance.
Satire is a powerful tool, but it can be a double-edged one. I would have hated to watch Jackie Mason in front of an all-non- Jewish crowd, and I love the faith that Ms. Nottage and Producing Artistic Director Jade King Carroll have in all of us, to present this play. This audacious work was chosen as a Chautauqua Theater Company production to help us examine our own prejudices and the stereotypes we carry within us, consciously or otherwise; and it invites us to do it through humor, and through the lens of one of our greatest living playwrights.
Surely, after the Black Like Me incident, it would have been easy to present a less challenging play. The fact that as a community we’re leaning into the conflict – using it as a teaching moment, as a way to move forward, together – is a beautiful thing.
I hope I can rise to the challenge, and I know my fellow audience members will feel the same way. The main character begins by demonizing the stereotyped characters around her, and ends by recognizing their strength, their grit, their humanity. It’s an arc the audience is invited to follow.
I know we can go in with respect. And I know we can go in and watch those stereotypical characters on stage, and understand they’re there not to represent a community, but to break open a door so that we can see behind the stereotypes to a deeper truth.
And to live up the Chautauquan ideals of respectful, civil dialogue. To walk away feeling like allies, not adversaries.
were inappropriate. Fabulation is a satire – a brilliant one – and it’s impossible to watch this play and not laugh.
So let’s go. Let’s laugh.
And after that, I hope, we can gather on the porch and, with respect, talk about the play – not to perpetuate those stereotypes, but to understand what it feels like to be seen through the lens of such caricatures. To learn not to repeat those stereotypes, but to talk about what we learned from the satire.
What we learned from laughter.
Because that, in the end, is what satire is there for.