Blue the play by Charles Randolph-Wright and theatre reviews

Phylicia Rashad and Michael McElroy of "Blue"

COMMENT

When Racial Expectations Undermine Artistic Judgement

New York Times Theatre Critic misses the mark in Blue review

By Ben Patrick Johnson

NEW YORK, 5 July 2001 - When sitting down to scribe his new play Blue, which opened off-Broadway at New York’s Gramercy Theatre on June 28th, playwright Charles Randolph-Wright was determined to present something never before seen on a major American stage: a black family drama where the frailties of the characters, and not the condition of their blackness, was the heart of the conflict.

Writing about life in a fictional South Carolina town reminiscent of the one in which he was raised, Randolph-Wright slowly reveals the secret at the core of an upper-middle class family, in the process letting us watch the painful unraveling of their elaborate, arrogant dysfunction. The creeping disquiet of the characters in Blue gives the play a dark underscore, and Randolph-Wright carries off a balancing act by weaving in just enough comedy to keep the audience engaged. His characters, such as Tillie, the outspoken family matriarch constantly at war with her vain daughter-in-law, keep their dignity at all times, never slipping into caricature. Both the humor and drama of Blue are drawn from the characters' vanities and foibles, never racial pratfalls.

The opening-night critical response was generally positive:

Newsday columnist Linda Winer, writing in the Los Angeles Times, noted at the top of her review that Reuben, the edgy, trumpet-playing narrator bent on escaping his past, "is not running from a life we know by heart from the usual mean streets of stage and screen. Not even close." She goes on to laud the playwright. "Randolph-Wright lifts his characters out of any threat of stereotype with wit, specificity and an honest sense of purpose."

Robert Dominguez, in the New York Daily News, called the play "an incisive family drama that deals smartly with themes of adultery and class conflicts in black society."

Notably missing the point was New York Times columnist Bruce Weber. Writing in the paper recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its series How Race is Lived in America, Weber seems alarmingly asleep at the wheel of his own racial insensitivity.

Though he goes on to afford Blue a generally positive review, Weber begins by labeling it "an amiable featherweight of a play." Weber is speaking in code: There is no stereotypical black anguish in Blue. Nobody's on crack. There is no gang violence. The characters are not twisting beneath the bridle of oppression. And Weber is disappointed.

Then he tips his hand: he complains that the family in Blue has "little to say about black culture as opposed to white culture, or about race relations in general."

Whose place is it to suggest that Randolph-Wright, an emerging force in American theatre, be bound by race to address such a mandate or, for that matter, represent any experience but his own?

Surely, in recent years, playwright August Wilson has peopled the stage with enough indignant black men to quell any protest that their trials have gone unsung. And on the same weekend "Blue" hit the boards in New York, American multiplexes have began screening the follow-up to filmmaker John Singleton’s 1991 saga Boyz N the Hood. The new film, titled Baby Boy, parades a group of unmarried black mothers past a familiar backdrop of urban violence and misogyny that was alarming in 1991 but, a decade later, is disturbing mostly in that it is no longer remarkable.

In the next sentence of his review, Weber compares Blue to the work of Neil Simon, who, he implies, has the (better) sense to fill the dialogue of his plays with Jewish cultural wisecracks. Weber suggests readers will find few other distinctions between the families of Simon and Randolph-Wright. Once again, Weber demonstrates his alarming incognizance.

Wright's appraisal of the Clark family recalls some of the greatest American plays of the twentieth century. I wonder if Weber would have been so quick to dismiss the (mundane?) suffering of Randolph-Wright's characters had they been written as Caucasian.

As long as we insist minority characters remain one-dimensional spokespeople for their respective race or religious tradition -- and sufficiently "ethnic" in the process -- our painstakingly cultivated concept of them as victims (comfortably distant from our own experience) can remain intact. But grant these fictional characters the right to experience emotions and speak in voices that could be mistaken for our own, and who knows what they may find the audacity to ask for next?

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Ben Patrick Johnson served as Executive Producer for the Original Cast Album of Blue. He is a contributing editor for HERO Magazine in Los Angeles. His novel, The Valley of Smoke, will be published by Palari Press in spring 2002.

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