Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✩
by Berend McKenzie, directed by Allen MacInnis & Tanisha Taitt
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
November 22-December 3, 2011
“Names Can Be Sticks and Stones”
Would You Say the Name of This Play? (nggrfg) is Berend McKenzie’s autobiographical one-man show about growing up both black and gay. It is a brave show for him to have written and to perform and it is necessary viewing for teenaged audiences and their parents since the insulting terms abbreviated into the consonants at the end of the titles are all too common in today’s schools. Adolescents suffer under two contradictory forces--one is the urge to discover their own individuality, the other is peer pressure to conform. McKenzie’s play shows what happens when discoveries motivated by the first force make conformity impossible.
McKenzie does not tell his stories in chronological order. In fact, they are carefully arrange to cover Mckenzie’s life from age 7 to 34 in ways that force the audience to draw parallels between discrimination against gays and against blacks. The morning I attended, McKenzie had a tough audience of mostly non-white teenaged students keen to show their unwillingness to see a play, especially one about a gay male. The first time McKenzie playing his alter ego Buddy announced he was gay was met with loud laughter even though it was not meant to be funny. “This is exactly why McKenzie wrote this play”, I thought, “ And this is exactly the audience that needs to see it.”
Buddy’s first story involves his successful attempt at age 16 to get the coolest girl in school to attend a bush dance with him instead of the jock boyfriend she’s usually seen with. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong. Buddy is undeniably effeminate and his attempt to be macho dooms him to failure. Unfortunately, the still restless audience Buddy’s satirizing of himself did not mean he is a fool but has gained a greater level of self-awareness. The first time silence finally descended on the audience is when Buddy’s best friend Mike disowns him because of a sex act Buddy’s is supposed to have committed with another man at the party but was too drunk to remember. The result is that that he is now banned from the school.
Subsequent stories going back or forward in time fill in Buddy’s background and force us to change our assumptions about what he is like. In the first story Buddy’s merely mentions his parents and two sisters, so we assume that they are black. It emerges, however, that Buddy was adopted and both parents are white. He tries to get in touch with his birth parents--a black Trinidadian father and a white mother. The conversation with his birth father goes well until Buddy mentions he is gay. His birth mother would like to meet Buddy, but says the time is not right for her or her family.
By knowing more of Buddy’s past we see that despite our first impressions Buddy is lucky to be raised by supportive parents who had no racial bias in adopting him and raising him as their son. At the same time his mixed race background makes it hard for him to be cast when later becomes an actor since he’s either not white enough or black enough. Buddy shows us how hilariously bad he is when he has to audition for the role of a gangsta rapper--yet another case of his inability to fit into conventional stereotypes.
In a flashback to age 7, we find that what Buddy is good at is skipping rope. He holds off ever displaying is skill in public until he realizes he is much better than the girl universally acclaimed as the jump rope master at school. He beats her in a skip-off but the result is that after school the boys call him the n-word and a slave and beat him up with is own rope. Dead silence reigned in the audience during McKenzie’s enacting of this incident as later when Buddy’s father confronts Buddy’s main tormentor and his father at their house.
Thus in only 70 minutes, the audiences shifted from aggressive indifference and open derision of Buddy as gay to anger at Buddy’s treatment as black. What one hopes is that teenagers are able to confront their internal contradiction in viewing racism but not homophobia as equally demeaning.
McKenzie is a warm, funny, heart-on-his-sleeve performer. He’s completely engaging and differentiates the dozen or so characters he plays with precision as well as Buddy as he appears as different ages. Though the show is focussed on growing up with what society views as two strikes against you, the show involves many other topics--growing up as an adopted child, growing up as a mixed race child, petty crime as an unconscious reaction to stress, the frustration of learning with ADHD and the truth that prejudice against those who are different doesn’t end after high school. Berend McKenzie provides a fine example of someone who has had to come to terms with prejudice. His laying bare of his personal history with such humour and compassion should help any viewers who find themselves in a similar situation or know someone who is. At least it will bring the topic out into the open, not to be covered up again, for every school class who sees it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Berend McKenzie. ©2011 Daniel Alexander.
For tickets, visit http://youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2011-11-24
Would You Say the Name of This Play? (nggrfg)