Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Jackie Sibblies Drury, directed by Ravi Jain
The Theatre Centre, Theatre Centre BMO Incubator, Toronto
November 6-29, 2015
Actor 4: “I don’t know if it’s theatre just because it’s in a theatre”
Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play from 2012 known, for short, as We Are Proud to Present, brings up a number of current topics concerning identity politics, ownership of stories, colourblind casting and, more generally, the ability of people from one time and place ever to understand truly the experiences of people from another time and place. Drury goes about this in a most peculiar manner that falls flat one moment only to excite the next.
Contrary to what one might expect from the long title, only 15 of its 90 minutes is devoted to a presentation about the Herero of Namibia, a tribe the government of German South-West Africa attempted to exterminate leading it to be called the first genocide of the 20th century. In fact, if you read the Wikipedia articles on “German South-West Africa” and “Herero and Namaqua Genocide”, where the actors say they did their research, you will learn more information about the two subjects than appears in the play.
Instead, Drury’s play is entirely metatheatrical. It is a play in the form of an extended workshop involving six actors – three black and three white – who are trying to develop a play about the Herero Genocide. Unsurprisingly, the actors own racial backgrounds become involved in their attempts to create scenes and characters of the play.
The first impetus for the group to create a play about the Herero comes from the Director (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah), who happened to see a photo of a woman in an article about the Herero who looked just like her grandmother. The woman was not the Director’s grandmother but the photo led her to read the article accompanying the photo and become interested in the story.
By reading the article she learns for the first time of the genocide of the Herero people. After greeting the audience the actors introduce themselves and present a year-by-year illustrated history of the German colony of South-West Africa from its founding in 1884 until its demise in 1915. The land was already occupied by many tribes, but the Germans granted the Herero precedence. As politics changed the Germans switched their allegiance to the Nama (whom the Dutch called “Hottentots” in ridiculing the sound of their language), then back to the Herero. When the Herero rebelled against German rule, plans were drawn up for their annihilation. From 1904 to 1907 they were dispossessed of their land, their wells were poisoned and they were driven into the Namib desert to die. Eighty percent of the Herero died. Many see the pattern of genocide in Namibia as prefiguring the the Nazi-led genocide in Europe. Drury mentions this only once, but it’s an important topic she could have explored to a much greater extent.
Th second impetus for the group to create their presentation is that, by unknown means, it has come into possession of the only physical documents that survive from German colonial rule in South-West Africa. These consist solely of letters sent home by German troops stationed in the colony. Whether to use the letters or not becomes a point of debate that takes up nearly an hour of the running time. This bizarre focus on the soldiers’ letters means that there is only one scene in the play about the life of the Herero on their own. Only when the group decides in the the last 20 minutes to move past the letters controversy and to shift to depicting the genocide itself, does the play become engaging for the longest consecutive amount of time.
The controversy over the letters stems from the fact that they are all relatively the same. Young men write their sweethearts back home and tell them they are well in Africa and the weather is hot. After numerous stagings – some comic, most boring – of a White Man (Brett Donahue) writing a letter to his girlfriend “Sarah” (Darcy Gerhart) back in Germany, someone has the brilliant idea of showing the White Man writing his letter while unwillingly enforcing the shoot to kill order of the government against the Herero.
This is the best moment of the play because Drury presents it without commentary from any of the cast. What the scene makes clear is that the German soldiers’ letter are so banal because the soldiers are deliberately avoiding any discussion of what really is happening in the colony since it is both too upsetting to them and would be too upsetting to those back home. Drury does not say so, but anyone who knows about the letters home of soldiers in World War I will realize that the same situation obtained there with the additional burden of government censorship should writers stray from the banal.
In the absence of any any useful descriptions of real life in the colony or of the genocide in particular, the actors debate not using the letters at all and substituting their imaginings of what the situation would have been like. Since none of the six have ever been to Africa and only one of them, Black Man (Marcel Stewart), has been to Germany, the actors wonder whether they even have the right to try to depict this story. If they base the story of the Herero and the colonial government on their own experiences, their presentation will be about them and not about the struggles of blacks and whites in 1884-1915.
Also, there is the question of what roles the actors should play. The Director has already named their roles according to their race as White Man (Brett Donahue), Another White Man (Brendan McMurtry-Howlett), Black Man (Marcel Stewart), Another Black Man (Michael Ayres) and Sarah (Darcy Gerhart), the generic girlfriend back home of the German soldiers. But the question arises whether whites can play the Herero and blacks the Germans. Stewart even asserts that he could play a German better than any of the whites. Similarly, McMurtry-Howlett proves in competing with the others that he is the best of all the actors at playing the Director’s own grandmother. This is an amazing scene, not only because McMurtry-Howlett is so convincing as an elderly black woman, but because a black female playwright has written it. Were a white man playwright to have written such a scene, he would be decried as racist. Instead, Drury seems to suggest that roles should be accorded to those actors who best can play them, irrespective of colour or gender.
Unfortunately, the rest of the cast does not agree with such a conclusion and the black actors are cast as the Herero and the whites as the Germans. From the very start the actors have agreed not to use accents, either German or Herero. But when the workshop finally moves on to depicting the genocide, White Man and Another White Man suddenly adopt American Southern accents and as does Black Man, their main victim. Since, as we discover, the actors are all American, their depiction of the genocide in African comes to resemble nothing more than a lynching of a black man in the American South urged on by the other actors both black and white. When Stewart starts to think that Donahue and McMurtry-Howlett have sunk so deeply into their roles that the staged hanging may become real, he escapes the stage and the rest are shocked by what has happened.
Donahue, who has repeatedly claimed he could never kill anyone in a play because he could never kill anyone in real life (revealing a profound misunderstanding of the nature of acting), has discovered to his shame that he could kill someone. Drury is thus using the old theatre-becomes-reality trope that has existed since at least Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587). She is also drawing on knowledge from World War II and the famous Milgram Experiment of 1961 that ordinary people do not know what evils they are capable of when caught up in obedience to authority, mass thinking and mass action.
What makes the lynching scene chilling is that it does originate in obedience to authority, the Director’s, and to mass action, the rhythmic chanting of the other actors. This scene, and all the strongest scenes of the play, are those that question the very nature of creating theatre. It is undemocratic with a central authority, the Director, who determines the hierarchy of the actors – White Man, Another White Man, etc. In the absence of documentation past history can be interpreted only through analogies to the present which necessarily falsify the original history. Then, who actually understands a past event best – someone tied by race to the participants or an outsider who can observe it more objectively? Besides this, is it possible to present a past event objectively at all? Will not bias, even unconscious bias, taint a creation?
While raising these fundamental questions is the chief virtue of the play, Drury execution undermines the play’s effectiveness. The play’s awkward, overexplanatory title is one introduction to the play’s central flaws. The title, like most of the play, is supposed to be funny, and why should a play about genocide be funny? The redundancy “Present a Presentation” suggests that the creators of the play are not vey bright or they would have caught the error. And why is the show called a “presentation” anyway instead of a “play”? “Presentation” suggests we are dealing with some sort of high school assignment, yet Drury never makes clear who the six actors are, how they know each other or who the target audience is for their work. Her note in the text states: “All are young, somewhere in their 20s, and they should seem young, open, skilled, playful and perhaps, at times, a little foolish”.
When you enter the BMO Incubator at The Theatre Centre, one of the six actors will seat you and make small talk as if you were a known member of the community. The actor will point out helpful articles, diagrams, maps and flags about the colonial history of Namibia for your perusal on display on a side wall looking very much like one might expect at a high school production. Director Ravi Jain takes great pains to make it appear that the workshop we are about to witness is real and not prescripted as, in fact, it is. The main problem is that once the “play-as-workshop” begins, the cast completely ignores us. At the end when they leave one by one, they say goodbye to each other but nothing to us and leave us wondering when exactly the show has ended. Thus Jain’s attempt to make the show appear to be unscripted completely fails.
Yet, this is as much Drury’s fault as it is Jain’s. The troupe’s one prepared piece is its historical survey of the history of German South-West Africa. Drury has made this, the more informative part of the show, appear deliberately risibly amateurish. Drury derives much of the show’s humour by highlighting what she calls the actors’ “foolishness” in puerile ego fits, total lack of knowledge of history and inability to separate self from role that one might have thought was basic to an actor’s training. Why Drury wants us to laugh at the follies of the group entrusted with telling an important story is totally unclear and dilutes our interest in what it has to say.
The show alternates between the actors playing actors arguing about how to do the play and scenes from their “presentation”. These scenes, however, are not like real workshop scenes since they come complete with sound and lighting cues. When interrupted the scenes fade under the return of the work lights. The obvious scriptedness of these scenes and the choreography for the musical interludes reveal the entire pretence that the actors are devising a play before our eyes as false. When we learn that the cast is supposedly American and not Canadian halfway through the action, our divorce from the initial illusion is complete.
Drury’s concept also asks something from actors that this extraordinarily difficult for them to do. They have to play themselves as actors without giving the illusion of acting. Of the six actors, Marcel Stewart is the most successful at doing this. Otherwise, the remaining five are never quite able to banish all signs of actorliness from their interactions. For this reason the scripted scenes are all far more effective than the actors’ supposedly unscripted arguments and disputes which too often come off as contrived by Drury to make points than as natural exchanges of the actors. This causes the show to lurch constantly between being involving and uninvolving until its excellent concentrated final twenty minutes.
We Are Proud to Present is thus an intriguing but frustrating experiment. We would like to know more about the Herero genocide and its implications, but Drury and her actors are far more caught up in the present than in depicting the past. The actors’ debates about what theatre and actors can and cannot do open up a wide range of important questions but settle none of them. Yet, Drury diminishes our interest in these debates by inviting us perhaps too archly to regard the actors as emotional and uninformed. If the whole play could be as engaging as the fully staged scenes and especially the final twenty minutes, the “presentation” might be a success. As it is, we have to sit through far too much tediously scripted “unscripted” argument for the show to energize us, as it would like, to reconsider fundamental aspects of the theatre.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Darcy Gerhart, Brett Donohue, Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah, Marcel Stewart, Michael Ayres and Bredan McMurtry-Howlett; Marcel Stewart, Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah and Michael Ayres. ©2015 Dahlia Katz.
For tickets, visit http://theatrecentre.org.
2015-11-07
We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Südwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915