![Posted by Colorlines News Editor Jamilah King, and visiting scholar/lecturer at NYU and Rutgers Darnell Moore, who joined us as panelists at the Sep 13 Talkback at The Submission—The conversation about race in America isn’t easy. In fact, it’s impossible to escape our country’s fraught history of antagonistic racial relations. Whether you’re giving someone the side eye on the train or trying to write the next great novel, it takes an enormous amount of effort to ignore what’s right in front of you, behind you, beside you, within you in black, brown, and white. Some of us try. And when we do it is often the case that words fail us or we’re given the privilege to believe that those words don’t exist. It makes sense, then, that Jeff Talbott’s play-writing debut on the messiness of race, sexuality, sex, and gender isn’t an easy play. Talbott’s play, The Submission, exposes characters that are as deliberately imperfect as the human beings who make up the audience. The characters relate to each other out of naiveté and deception. The sarcastic, and sometimes sadistic, humor encountered throughout seems to have been carefully planned to exaggerate our quintessential human tendency to hurt as much as we love others who are different from us. The play’s words carry the viewer to places where some liberal white (queer) folks are often too afraid to go: the truths of ownership, of phenotypic privilege, of perspective, of difference even as they materialize among white progressives. And, some progressive black (straight) folk are forced to consider the truths of marginalization among the marginalized, heterosexual privilege, of perspective, and of difference as well. In the play, Danny Larsen (Jonathan Groff), a white, gay, fledgling playwright, pens a provocative play based on the lives of an urban alcoholic black mother and her son, which emerged when Danny observed the interactions of a black mother and son on a train. The twist is: Danny credits the imagined Shaleeha G’ntamobi, a name that he creates for the supposed black woman, as the writer. So, Danny concocts the ingenious (at least, he thought it was) plan of hiring a black actress, Emilie Martin (Rutina Wesley), to “play” the role of Shaleeha. Danny lies because he fears that his work would be rejected as contender in a national playwriting contest if folk discovered that the submission about a black woman and son was written by a gay white man. Emilie acquiesces because she is a struggling actress in need of a job and money even though the play, itself, contained the infamous N-word at least 37 times. Oh, the things that Danny and Emilie would do for fame and money, though, it doesn’t sound as far from the reality of most of us in real life as the play would have us believe. The characters in this play are strikingly familiar. Danny is the guy you nearly bumped into while he was hunched over his laptop at Starbucks who insists that he knows black folks as well as he knows Broadway. Or the friend of a friend who insists on playing it safe, choosing to ignore altogether the minefield of uneasy conversations loaded with ubiquitous racism and homophobia, like Danny’s friend Trevor (Will Rogers) who remains relatively low key throughout the play until Danny hurls the N-word at Emilie, Trevor’s love interest. Yet, it is Trevor who will likely resonate with many in the audience, those who aren’t racist or homophobic, but have been in the company of racists and homophobes without offering a challenge in the face of discriminatory words and practices. Or the talented homegirl who’s pining for work in the art that she loves, and since the game is rigged anyway, why not play along, even if that means she might be complicit in the very act of racism that also boggles her. You’ll see their worlds collide. You’ll feel yours spin a little, too. You’ll hear the audience cringe, or laugh, or entertain itself for the 100 minutes it takes for everyone in the theater to discover that whatever questions they had won’t be answered or that they had been invited to view caricatures of themselves, somewhere at some point, on stage. And during the final act…and in the post-play talkback…and on the train ride home s/he will wonder if s/he had been invited to interrogate her/his own issues, or those of Jeff Talbott, the white gay male playwright, who achieves at writing a play about a white gay male playwright who is writing a play about a black woman. The question of authorship takes center stage, literally, in the works of the fictionalized Danny and the real-time Jeff. What one discovers is the fact that authors/artists tend to work from imagination. The simple truth is that the American imaginary is never free from racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist scripts. And, if that truth is uncovered in the work of the artist, then it might be said that the artist achieved the task at hand.[Pictured: Jonathan Groff and Rutina Wesley. Photo by Joan Marcus.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls8zpffZRs1qaaxe7o1_500.jpg)
Posted by Colorlines News Editor Jamilah King, and visiting scholar/lecturer at NYU and Rutgers Darnell Moore, who joined us as panelists at the Sep 13 Talkback at The Submission—
The conversation about race in America isn’t easy. In fact, it’s impossible to escape our country’s fraught history of antagonistic racial relations. Whether you’re giving someone the side eye on the train or trying to write the next great novel, it takes an enormous amount of effort to ignore what’s right in front of you, behind you, beside you, within you in black, brown, and white. Some of us try. And when we do it is often the case that words fail us or we’re given the privilege to believe that those words don’t exist.
It makes sense, then, that Jeff Talbott’s play-writing debut on the messiness of race, sexuality, sex, and gender isn’t an easy play. Talbott’s play, The Submission, exposes characters that are as deliberately imperfect as the human beings who make up the audience. The characters relate to each other out of naiveté and deception. The sarcastic, and sometimes sadistic, humor encountered throughout seems to have been carefully planned to exaggerate our quintessential human tendency to hurt as much as we love others who are different from us.
The play’s words carry the viewer to places where some liberal white (queer) folks are often too afraid to go: the truths of ownership, of phenotypic privilege, of perspective, of difference even as they materialize among white progressives. And, some progressive black (straight) folk are forced to consider the truths of marginalization among the marginalized, heterosexual privilege, of perspective, and of difference as well. In the play, Danny Larsen (Jonathan Groff), a white, gay, fledgling playwright, pens a provocative play based on the lives of an urban alcoholic black mother and her son, which emerged when Danny observed the interactions of a black mother and son on a train. The twist is: Danny credits the imagined Shaleeha G’ntamobi, a name that he creates for the supposed black woman, as the writer. So, Danny concocts the ingenious (at least, he thought it was) plan of hiring a black actress, Emilie Martin (Rutina Wesley), to “play” the role of Shaleeha. Danny lies because he fears that his work would be rejected as contender in a national playwriting contest if folk discovered that the submission about a black woman and son was written by a gay white man. Emilie acquiesces because she is a struggling actress in need of a job and money even though the play, itself, contained the infamous N-word at least 37 times. Oh, the things that Danny and Emilie would do for fame and money, though, it doesn’t sound as far from the reality of most of us in real life as the play would have us believe.
The characters in this play are strikingly familiar. Danny is the guy you nearly bumped into while he was hunched over his laptop at Starbucks who insists that he knows black folks as well as he knows Broadway. Or the friend of a friend who insists on playing it safe, choosing to ignore altogether the minefield of uneasy conversations loaded with ubiquitous racism and homophobia, like Danny’s friend Trevor (Will Rogers) who remains relatively low key throughout the play until Danny hurls the N-word at Emilie, Trevor’s love interest. Yet, it is Trevor who will likely resonate with many in the audience, those who aren’t racist or homophobic, but have been in the company of racists and homophobes without offering a challenge in the face of discriminatory words and practices. Or the talented homegirl who’s pining for work in the art that she loves, and since the game is rigged anyway, why not play along, even if that means she might be complicit in the very act of racism that also boggles her.
You’ll see their worlds collide. You’ll feel yours spin a little, too. You’ll hear the audience cringe, or laugh, or entertain itself for the 100 minutes it takes for everyone in the theater to discover that whatever questions they had won’t be answered or that they had been invited to view caricatures of themselves, somewhere at some point, on stage. And during the final act…and in the post-play talkback…and on the train ride home s/he will wonder if s/he had been invited to interrogate her/his own issues, or those of Jeff Talbott, the white gay male playwright, who achieves at writing a play about a white gay male playwright who is writing a play about a black woman. The question of authorship takes center stage, literally, in the works of the fictionalized Danny and the real-time Jeff. What one discovers is the fact that authors/artists tend to work from imagination. The simple truth is that the American imaginary is never free from racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist scripts. And, if that truth is uncovered in the work of the artist, then it might be said that the artist achieved the task at hand.
[Pictured: Jonathan Groff and Rutina Wesley. Photo by Joan Marcus.]
