Assumptions and the Body

As the semester comes to a close, I’m thinking again of how we talk about Latin American identity, particularly in terms of bodies and physical characteristics. The following two lists, from Latina.com, sets the readers up against their own expectations and preconceptions about the physical signifiers of Latino/a heritage.

The first, “101 Stars You Never Knew Were Latino!” presents us with a (lengthy) list of celebrities who are not commonly known to be of Latin descent. Underneath a number of the slides is a poll asking the reader, “Were you surprised?”  In most cases, the answer is overwhelmingly “Yes.”

The second list presents the same basic concept, in reverse: “30 Stars You Thought Were Latino—But Aren’t!” Again, the list stretches on, the captions often speaking to a sense of surprise on the behalf of the reader.

Admittedly, I don’t watch much television and I’m not terribly informed on pop culture outside of a certain subset, so after the first few better-known celebrities in each list, I didn’t recognize many names or faces. But obviously, the trick of these lists is the assumption that most people do not know much about the lives and personal histories of these celebrities. Rather, they are both playing off of the visual cues we use to categorize people – allowing us to see the workings behind our own processes for determining who a person is by a few surface-level signifiers.

Click through the list of stars you aren’t expected to know are Latino/a, and you will see people that at a glance appear to be either conventionally Caucasian or African American, with names like “Gallagher,” “Carpenter” or “Keegan.” The first face on the list is the comedian Louis C.K., who is apparently white, with reddish hair and a Hungarian last name (Szekely.) The blurb attached helpfully points out that C.K. is half Mexican, and lived with his father’s side of the family in Mexico until he was eight years old. The caption for actress Majandra Delfino includes her recounting of the people’s hesitance to categorize her as Latina:

“People here are very limited in their exposure to South Americans,” she says. “They say, ‘But you’re white!’ and I say ‘yes we come in pale too.’ Then they go, ‘but you have green eyes!’ and I’m like, ‘Yup we have that too.’ And then they go, ‘but you don’t look Mexican!’ and I’m like, ‘Because I’m not.’

On the list of “Latino/as” that aren’t, we can see a similarly simple pattern: names like “Esposito,” “Sabato,” and “Quinto” appear, and the captions make frequent references to their “tanned” complexions, which are not actually the result of Latin heritage but often various mixes of Italian, Filipino, African-American descent (just to name the few most commonly repeated).

So, what are we left with here? Clearly, these lists are playing with our preconceived notions of Latino/a identity based on external indicators. They make rather apparent our dependence on established conventions of identity based on an individual’s body. So then, are these lists just perpetuating a relatively static (and superficial) conception of what it means to appear Latino/a? Does emphasizing reactions of surprise reinforce stereotypes and categorization? Or do these lists, by representing the boundaries of ethnicity as vague and resistant to immediate interpretation, allow for a destabilization of these preconceived set of ethnic categories?

La hora de los hornos: Violence, Testimonio and an Embodied Argentina

I have been thinking a lot about testimonio’s relationship to theatre this semester. Some of questions I having been mulling over are: What happens when a testimonial narrative is embodied? By embodied I mean that the body of the person who has the story to tell is placed on stage/screen not replaced by a book, and they speak in their actual voice, not through text. This is clearly not a question about whether the filmed testimonio is more or less authentic than the written: there is still the presence of a third person director whose hand guides the editing and composition of the film. How would a theatrical testimonio work though? It is more a question of the effect of the body and voice upon the audience. The fact of the speaking subject’s physicality has the potential to rob them of an authority that the written narrative conveys and what effect does their physical individuality have on their potential to “speak” on behalf of others?

Thinking about these kinds of questions made me want to take a closer look at a film which uses testimonio, among many other techniques, to great effect. La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Braziers) is a film made in 1968 written by Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Octavio Getino and directed by Solanas. The film is a three part, 4 hour impassioned call to the Argentinian people to rise up in armed struggle against neocolonial violence. It was prohibited in Argentina but won prizes outside of the country. In a filmed interview on the making of La hora de los hornos, Solanas describes the wide variety of mediums that he wanted the film to encompass. A musician by training, in 1959 he entered Buenos Aires’ theatre school knowing that he wanted to make films but conscious that the directors he most admired (Orson Welles, Luchino Visconti) were originally theatre directors. Solanas wanted to make “opera cinematographica- el equivalente de la opera en cine” (Solanas, interview). Solanas understands opera here as an event of epic proportions; opera as an art of arts, a carefully crafted montage of music, song (chorus and solos), dance and drama.

The kind of film Solanas wanted to make had/s no name in film terminology and as he says himself, La hora de los hornos required “the re-invention of the film” (Solanas, filmed interview). The invention of the film was in Solanas’ project parallel to the invention of a truly Argentinian reality; he describes as fundamental, “We had to start ton ame things for ourselves … start to invent own words, and when  say words, I mean our own ideas, our own images” (Solanas, filmed interview). In La hora de los hornos Solanas visually seeks to represent an embodied Argentinian reality on screen. One of the techniques he uses is countless close ups of countless faces largely of rural people throughout Argentina. These hundreds of portraits function to create a kind of real but also imaginary collective which then becomes the collective that is represented by the testmonios given in the later part of the film. The film seems to reverse the normal order of testimonio by presenting the Argentinian pueblo first, then letting some speak on behalf of this already established community.

The third part of the film then opens with the quote from Che “un hombre despierta de su muerte y comienza a amar tanto la vida que arriesga su vida a fin de poderla vivir” and the third part of the film, titled “Violence and Liberation,” contains the most testimonio. It opens with the chapter “A history of violence” in which an old man relates his experiences of strikes in Patagonia which culminated in what are referred to as “The executions of Patagonia.”

 

One of things that is fascinating about La hora de los hornos is the way in which it effectively installs violence as the organizing principle of Argentina’s past, present and future. This strikes me as interesting because is not a characterization of Latin America as violent from outside but one produced entirely from within. There is nothing to which the theme of violence is not related be it love, liberation, the law, history, politics and culture. Violence is almost proposed as a natural and immanent part of Argentinian society. It seems however that this might be the point. If violence is shown to be an everyday experience then partaking in armed struggle in the name of liberation loses its threatening implication and becomes simply the obvious reaction to an untenable but ultimately colonial situation.

 

 

Queers, Latinos, and the Politics of the Dead Bodies

I recently came across this article  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/us/joaquin-luna-jrs-suicide-touches-off-immigration-debate.html?pagewanted=all  that talks about how an 18 year old Hispanic adolescent committed suicide , presumably because out of desperation that his undocumented status would prevent him from attending college.

The article conveys the message that such deaths, however tragic  and untimely, are never  simply deaths “in  themselves” – they are  framed and perceived through discourse  , and often come to acquire meaning based on the need for iconography.  But what exactly is at stake in  transforming  figures like Joaquin Luna in icons of the broader struggle of X Y and Z? If  one deems the cause for which the icon is deployed worthwhile, then should one still attempt to “deconstruct” it or, at the very least, think critically about it?

I will digress for a few second and bring in a parallel example. In her book “In a Queer Time and Place”,  queer theorist Judith Halberstam talks about how  queer figures such as Brandon Teena (Teena Brandon), a biological  female who lived and loved [women] by presenting himself as a man and was murdered for it, was transformed into an icon in the fight to stop violence against ‘gender deviant’ people. A similar case is that of Matthew Shephard, violently murdered because of his homosexuality.  Though Halberstam is of course on the same page as those who denounce and fight such forms of violence, she  draws attention to the fact that such forms of “idolization”  in the form of a “Brandon Teena/Matthew Shephard industry” (movies, books, etc)   may occlude similar forms of violence against, for instance, queers of color, who are not as likely to be rallied around as icons in the struggle against homophobia.  Part of the problem with idolization of  figures such as Teena and Shepard, Halberstam would also seem to suggest, is that it almost inevitably gets coopted for a specific kind of politics – identity politics that harden and further naturalize notions of “sexual orientation” and “sexual identity” rather than help implode them.  Many would refer to Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon  as a lesbian or transsexual, but Halberstam would insist that he would be better understood as an invert, an  earlier model that current deployments of  notions of sexual orientation and gender identity decry as anachronistic in the struggle to affirm, rather than question, identity.

What about the young Hispanic male who committed suicide, then? The NY Times article  suggests that even while there was no certainty that Joaquin indeed committed suicide over the disabling effects of his legal status,  he was nevertheless immediately  taken up as “poster boy” (literally) by  organizations  concerned with the plight of undocumented immigrants.   This is surely a commendable struggle to fight. But what happens if we  attempt to think through these issues of representation rather than take them ‘at face value’, so to speak? By framing Joaquin’s death as a failure to pursue a quintessential American dream, such campaigns  perpetuate rather than question the notion of the ‘self-made’ person: if only Joaquin had had legal status, then his life would have been a most successful story of uplift from poverty.   The article notes that “In his letter to Jesus, he [Joaquin] suggested that another issue was troubling him, saying he was “fearful to fall in any temptation,” though he did not elaborate”. In a purely speculative mode, I’d like to ask, what if Joaquin had had same-sex inclinations? Would there be a way to “promote” him that could ‘ shake the system ‘ in more than one way, by  staging multiple demands rather an identity foreclosur (“he was killed because he was gay”; “he killed himself because he was an undocumented immigrant”)? Could there be a “Joaquin Luna” politics that wouldn’t (just) seek to appeal to liberal sensibilities of “improvement” and “uplift” of minorities, but would also insert an element of disconcert into the struggle?

Works Cited:

Fernandez, Manny. “Disillusioned Young Immigrant Kills Himself, Starting an EmotionalDebate.”   New York Times. Web. 10 Dec 2011. Accessed 15 Dec 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/us/joaquin-luna-jrs-suicide-touches-off-immigration-debate.html?pagewanted=all

Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place. Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005. Print.

TIME Magazine Person of the Year

Mohamed Bouazizi's mother holds a picture of him in memoriam

 

I was very excited to read who TIME Magazine announced as their Person of the Year: The Protester. Author of the TIME article Kurt Andersen was interviewed on why The Protester was selected, to which he replied that for years he thought “Protest had fallen out of fashion as an effective political tool.” After the Vietnam War, groups were no longer mobilizing in acts of resistance. But in recent years, a combination of growing public dissatisfaction and the availability of technology has contributed to the increased number in people joining a cause. He described protest as being something of a contagion, which is becoming more and more influenced by global events. Protestors are not just gaining support on a local level, but the movements are also garnering large-scale attention and can become models for other demonstrations. Andersen noted how protests happening in one part of the country were influencing the development of protests on the other side of the globe. For instance, Wall Street protesters modeled aspects of their structure after Spain protesters who were staying and refusing to leave their locale.

Technology has played a major role in propelling this forward with protests in Tunisia and Egypt utilizing Facebook, Twitter, email to get news out as to where demonstrations were going to take place. The ways in which social media has given people information has empowered many to act immediately and to organize in ways not previously seen. When visiting protesting groups in Egypt, Andersen was shocked at the infrastructure set in place, comparing the demonstrations to municipalities or small governments.

In addition to sharing best practices, technology has also helped to support the spirit behind the protest in a very unexpected way.  Common reasons for sparking the protest, such as corruption in governments, politicians, and corporations have a strengthening effect on transnational protests if they are paralleled in the news media. By knowing that there are multiple pockets protesting similar if not the same issues, people’s resolve is strengthened in their power of affecting change. With that said, the hope is that the spurt in protest demonstrations will not be “fad for 2011” but instead will continue to gain strength a have a long-term impact on shaping national politics. The notable examples that set this in motion are 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire as a protest to the bureaucratic loopholes implemented to trap citizens, and the mobilizations in Egypt to contest the fraudulent election and protest the entire governmental structure. From there, protests have erupted globally and in large scales; Greece’s number of protesters in Syntagma Square grew from 100,000 to 500,000 in one week. George Anastasopoulos described that event as “overwhelming” and said after seeing the number grow, “That enthused us so much, and we started dreaming really big.” Another protester in Madrid beautifully described what he saw during those protests, “It was marvelous to see people become the actors in their own lives… You could watch them breaking out of their passivity.”

As our class is coming to a close, I found this article particularly moving. The many images surrounding murders in Juarez, the Dirty Wars, tortures in Cambodia, and massacres in Peru to name a few, all for the acquisition of some form of power over an oppressed people has been disheartening. But the performed acts of resistance in these protests is a reminder to the illusion of power many of those regimes operate under. I am reminded of a quote by Diana Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire in which she states, “Performance carries the possibility of challenge, even self-challenge, within it. As a term simultaneously connoting a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world, it far exceeds the possibilities of these other words offered in its place.”

 

Sources

Andersen, Kurt. The Protester. TIME Magazine. December 14, 2011.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373-4,00.html

 

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Duke UP. Durham. p. 15.

Colombia, Clothing & Consumption

In the September 26, 2011 issue of the New Yorker, David Owen writes an article about bulletproof fashion in Colombia. Owen visited the Bogota warehouse of Miguel Caballero, who specializes in designer bulletproof clothing, catering mainly to political leaders and celebrities but also to journalists and clergymen. Because the New Yorker article, titled “Survival of the Fitted”, is not available for free online, I refer here to an interview David Owen did with PRI’s radio show, The World. In it, he talks about the experience of being shot in the gut by Caballero with a .38 caliber Colombian military gun while wearing an item of clothing from his collection. He says :

It was sort of undramatic.  I felt a little thump in my stomach and then nothing.  It didn’t bruise my abdomen or it didn’t knock me onto the ground, two questions that friends of mine have asked me.  But it was really fun, I like it.  I had to put on ear protection because it was very loud, and then I got to keep my bullet.

Juan Radrigán and Representing the Disappeared

Like many of us on this blog, I’ve been continuing to think through representation of disappeared persons.  Looking around for other playwright’s tactics for staging this, I came across Chilean playwright Juan Rodrigán’s play Hechos Consumados (in Ana Elena Puga’s translation Finished from the Start).  Once the semester is over, I encourage everyone to pick up the text.

Hechos Consumados, Teatro El Telón, Remounted 1986

Performance or the Art of Conceiving our Body at Risk

Worthen’s text “Antigone’s bones” concentrates on both the relationship between theater and performance and on the relationship between the former and the writing itself. Indeed, the separation of theater from other forms of literature is here implicit. This leads me to reflect, guided by some of the theories Worthen puts forward in his text, upon the following: maybe what seems to be an evident difference between what Goldman calls “theater of acting” and literary texts, such as poetry and narrative, becomes less evident when the body’s agency (either as an image in poetry or as matter on stage) comes into play. According to Worthen’s quotations from Goldman, the latter proposes talking about drama in such a way that it becomes detached from the notions used for reading literature. This leads Goldman to highlight, in his words, “the confrontation that takes place between any actor and his audience” (qtd. in Worthen 14), which implies making a distinction between “the theater of acting” and other forms of performance (e.g. “circuses, demonstrations, ballet…”). Regarding this approach, Worthen states the following: “Conceptualizing drama as an instrument of performance, Goldman’s work can be understood as part of a widespread movement to rethink the ‘interpretation’ of drama, and resituate an ‘interpretative’ model of the text-to-performance” (14).

This theoretical content and Taylor’s notions of “archive” and “repertoire,” that Worthen refers to at the beginning of her text, prompt me to raise the following question: does not the development of performance theory tend to deal with the disappearance of boundaries between different forms of performance and literary genders rather than demarcating them?  Ralli’s Antígona or the activism of H.I.J.O.S in Argentina, for example, immediately come to mind. While the former erases the boundary between drama and poetry, the latter somehow removes the demarcated distinctions between “theater of acting” and demonstration. What I mean with this statement is that Goldman’s notion of “text-to-performance” might include not only those texts written to be staged, but also implicit texts (which might be the case of H.I.J.O.S.) and literary texts (which support the notion of literature from which Goldman separates drama). It is certainly not a coincidence that Taylor includes in her book The Archive and the Repertoire the study of both H.I.J.O.S. and Ralli’s Antígona. If Goldman stated an interpretative model concentrated on drama, a gender in which the text necessarily involves a performance, Taylor takes this approach to its most extreme possibilities. The idea of performance she develops does not only separate performance from the Western notion of writing (e.g.H.I.J.O.S.), but also takes possession of literary texts to turn them into a possibility for a repertoire (e.g. Ralli’s Antigona). Regarding this idea, one might conclude that every text where the body plays the most important role (either in a poetic piece or in the implicit script that supports a demonstration) is, potentially, a performance. In other words, every text where the body is an essential component, if not the most essential one, might be—to use Goldman’s words—a text-to-performance. According to this, performance implies, in some way, the significant act of putting our body at risk.

In this sense—and I am thinking now of the question appler2000 raises by the end of her last post—it is, indeed, not possible “to stage a performance about Ciudad Juarez [or about other similar stories] for purely aesthetic purposes.” On the contrary, the response of performance to that kind of violence should be one that makes us conceive our body at risk: like Ana Mendieta’s work does or the “Protesting Body” that somethingmarginallyclever talks about in his post.

Bodies and Screens: Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez’s Installation Pieces

At the beginning of this year, 2011, the University of Pittsburgh hosted a series titled “Contemporary Queer Cinemas Public Film Series” sponsored by the women’s studies department intended “to call attention to queerness in narrative, spaces and different national contexts” (McGinnis, The Pitt News).

As part of that series, the installation work of artist and activist Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez was featured in a special event in March at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh consisting of a film screening and talk-back. The screenings included escrito: experimental video (2009), fragments of migration: video installation excerpt (2009), and un/binding desires: video installation excerpt (2011).

While I did not have the pleasure of attending these screenings or the talk-back with the artist, I was introduced to Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez’s work over the summer through online videos. I was immediately stuck by the visual imagery and focus on the body in her work. Speaking specifically of her most recent piece, un/binding desires (video above), I am thinking of how Enríquez-Enríquez’s work can add to the conversations we have been having in relation to corporeality and the body in performance and some of the questions raised by Emma Freeman in On-Screen Narratives in Camino and Mexico-USA.

Mónica Enríquez-Enríquez is a queer Latina, born and raised in Colombia. She has an MFA in the Digital Arts and New Media from University of California Santa Cruz. Art is for her “a site for community activism and participation as well as a site to question institutional oppression and challenge normative constructions of gender, desire, citizenship and nation” (Rhee). This platform of public performance and circulation creates an interaction between the viewer/participant and the screen but to what degree does that intimate space invite the spectator to engage with conversations about the body in performance if the only bodies present are those of the spectators?

"un/binding desire" (2011)

As the video caption states, “un/binding desires is intended to be experienced as a video installation with parallel screens opposite to each other inviting the audience participants to engage aurally and visually to negotiate the experience of having to turn their backs to certain bodies, images, and stories in order to interact with both screens.” This mediated performance raises questions for me about the absence of the body in performance in this project and how that resonates with notions of the spectators’ body negotiating the installation space of this piece. The video itself is focused on the body (specifically Enríquez-Enríquez’s body) through the imagery of a white rope binding a female body which is shot in multiple angles, close-ups, and tight framing while a voice-over narration of stories, expressed in English and Spanish, of migration and queerness by Latin American bodies are shared.

"escrito" (2009)

Similarly, the video escrito depicts writing on the body in close-up shots of bare flesh covered in black inked words to express the narrativization of the body as the voice-over narrator (specifically Enríquez-Enríquez) states, “I’ve had to write many versions of myself…” expressing the difficulties of constructing identity. The voice-over interchanges between English and Spanish though-out the piece.

 

"fragements of migration" (2009)

Enríquez-Enríquez’s fragments of migration is also a Spanish-English video installation which incorporates audio interviews with four transgender women from Mexico and one lesbian from El Salvador involved in the U.S. asylum process. In this piece, three screens with rear projection serve as dislocated frames that show representations of loss, asylum, and institutional violence through interactive engagement with the audience.  The audio is constantly playing but the screens do not display video and only “perform” when an audience member stands nearby.  According to Enríquez-Enríquez, “The interaction with the screens invites the audience participants to interrogate their tacit approval of the normative narratives required of queer migrants and the violences inherent in the asylum process” (Rhee). While I am captured by the videos themselves, I am more interested in the “performance” of these pieces and the audience interaction Enríquez-Enríquez intends for. Are the screen images enough to create the environment Enríquez-Enríquez seeks for community activism?

 

Works Cited

Enríquez-Enríquez, Monica. Home | Danm.ucsc.edu. Web. 14 Dec. 2011. <http://danm.ucsc.edu/~mpenriqu/home.html&gt;.

McGinnis, Ryan. “Series Focuses on Contemporary Queerness.” THe Pitt News [Pittsburgh, PA] 23 Jan. 2011. The Pitt News | Daily Student Newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh. Web. 14 Dec. 2011. <http://pittnews.com/newsstory/32438/&gt;.

Rhee, Margaret. “Crossing Borders in the Digital and Flesh: Monica Enriquez-enriquez! | HASTAC.” Home | HASTAC. 8 Apr. 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2011. <http://hastac.org/blogs/margaret-rhee/crossing-borders-digital-and-flesh-monica-enriquez-enriquez&gt;.

 

Gingrich Decides He Gets to Decide Who is Real

Recently, GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich called Palestinians an “invented people.”  As several news sources point out, many people have been quick to denounce Gingrich for this comment.  The Christian Science Monitor makes a whole story out of Joseph Lieberman (“the first Jew on a major party’s national ticket”) opposition to the comments. Lieberman is quoted as saying, “To me the important fact is, the Palestinians are a people today and any resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has to be between two peoples, two nations.”

From the Huffington Post Article

‘Race’ Opening at the Goodman Theatre

After reading 101 Reasons to Get Past the Headline, humorously I almost named this post My 3 Reasons Why I Can’t Get Past The Title…

‘Race’ is the latest play by David Mamet that opens at the Goodman Theatre in January and is hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “intellectually salacious.” The play originally debuted on Broadway in 2009 to mixed reviews, but most of the critiques focus on the flaws in the plot and dramatic build as opposed to the approach to the subject of race. Although I have never seen the play and I usually support the Goodman’s commitment to multi-cultural, multi-ethnic productions i.e. Ruined by Lynn Nottage, El Noglar by Tanya Saracho, and the Latino Theatre Festival, I have some concerns about the production.

Goodman Theatre advertisement for 'Race'

The play synopsis describes the plot being about two lawyers “one black, one white” who are defending a “wealthy, white man accused of raping an African-American woman” but who find “a complex case where blatant prejudice is as disturbing as the evidence at hand.” Though there are clearly multiple themes i.e. sexual assault, distribution of wealth, potentially flawed legal system, but the main thread being pulled out and highlighted in the title is race. Not knowing the play but inferring from this synopsis, race is being defined in the context of racism. As has been stated in previous posts, I believe this immediately sets up race as being a problem, a means of dividing and separating people. Also, the idea of race has an immediate implication of Caucasian being the Subject, and all other races the Other. This binary model is clearly established in that all the characters within the play only represent two races: Caucasian and African-American. Not only is there a gaping absence in the representation of multiple races, this model and play synopsis seems to set up a _____ vs. _____ opposition to explore the ambiguous term “race,” which already has its own implications.

Cover of play

My next point of contention is with the marketing of the play. What is represented in the advertisement picture is part of the body of an African-American female. Apparently only her chest was worth presenting, as her head and rest of the torso has been cut out of the frame. Another picture that shows the lower half of an African-American woman in a red sequined dress (apparently an important plot point) sitting invitingly on a bed. Not only does this reinforce the idea of Black as the representation of race, and in some minds a representation of Other, this also reduces a whole woman into body parts. This is equally disturbing since the play is focused on themes of sexual assault. Also noteworthy is the sexually suggestive depiction of the woman pressing the charge of rape. Besides this reinforcing the archaic notion that suggestive clothing is linked to and compromises the credibility of the accuser, this is also problematic layered onto the female body in a play called ‘Race’ thus leaving a very distorted lens of how to view women of color.

For my last concern, I have to start out by making it known that I do not hate David Mamet. I have found the ideas behind some of his pieces to be thought provoking and relevant, combined with sharp dialogue. Also, for better or for worse, he leaves an impression as a playwright, which I can respect. With that said, I have often found myself shaking my head in disgust at the negative portrayal of women within his plays. Case in point, one of the most obvious examples I believe is the character of Carol in ‘Oleanna,’ who is only marginally developed in contrast to the opposite character John. This seems to be replicated again in ‘Race’ with the only female character presented onstage (not the female accuser) is in a position of submission to the central character, Jack, and at one point is subjected to re-enacting the sexual assault/consensual encounter in the courtroom. Wearing a red sequined dress. And she is African American.

Again, I have not seen the production, and perhaps it is a riveting look at the complexities of ‘race’ and if it is, I will eat my blogged words and buy a ticket to the January show.

 

Sources

Ng, David. David Mamet’s Race on Broadway: What did the critics think? The New York Times, December 2009.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/12/david-mamets-race-on-broadway-what-did-the-critics-think.html