A Stained Glass Menagerie

Abstract

A Stained Glass Menagerie Matthieu Chapman (bio) Winter 2012. La Jolla, California. I make my way across the University of California at San Diego campus to the La Jolla Playhouse to see our department's production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Usually, Tennessee Williams is not my preferred fare, but my Black roommate was playing the role of Jim, Laura's gentleman caller. I had yet to see my roommate perform in person, and I was excited to see his work. The production ripped the excitement from my chest and replaced it with a cold discomfort. I don't know if the director engaged in color-blind, colorconscious, or some other form of racially focused casting or not. But I do know that Jim was the only character played by a Black actor. Seeing this Black man pursue this white woman in 1940s Saint Louis asked countless questions that the performance did not attempt to answer. I could not help but think of Cleo Wright, a Black man accused of making an advance on a white woman in nearby Sikeston, Missouri. On January 25, 1942, a white mob invaded the city jail and lynched Wright. I could not help but think of the 1917 East Saint Louis race massacre, where the white citizens of East Saint Louis murdered between fifty and two hundred and fifty Black residents and left more than six thousand homeless. Segregation, lynching, secession—Missouri's history is rife with anti-Black violence. Representation matters, both for better and for worse. Seeing Black bodies in diverse roles on stage and screen is a small but meaningful part of addressing centuries of oppression and violence. However, the American stage has long been a perpetrator of the violent erasure of Black bodies, Black voices, and Black thought. The modern American theatrical canon—the "classics" that theatres use to bolster subscription revenues and structure seasons—is a collection of early American greats such as Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon, [End Page 30] Golden Age musicals including Oklahoma! and The Music Man, and European imports ranging from William Shakespeare to Henrik Ibsen. With these giants still a fundamental part of the theatrical zeitgeist, theatre history is our theatre present. But not all history is created equal. From the Great White Way to the stage floors of the ivory tower, American theatre is the product of a nation built on anti-Black violence. Each of the examples given above, with or without explicit racism from the playwright, is a product of a world positioned in history alongside Jim Crow, Civil Rights, lynchings, and slavery. When we place plays from historical periods in which Black bodies were three-fifths of the way along the continuum that began with Blacks as nothing and still today has not reached full subject, we must be careful that our desire for representation doesn't reproduce false narratives of history that do damage to Black actors and audiences in the present. If we are not careful with our handling of America's and the world's histories of anti-Black violence, we risk our staging creating an irreconcilable antagonism in which our showing that "representation matters" proves that Black lives don't. If historiography is the study of the social, cultural, and political circumstances and biases that influence the creation of the historical record, we perform a historiographical exercise every time we stage a historical play. In our directing choices, we choose whose history, which version of history, and how to present that history to a contemporary audience. We are rewriting the history of that play in the present. At the same time, we are giving value to specific historical precedents. Casting, then, becomes an integral part of the historiographical process of the stage. We must strive to engage with difficult questions not only of the historical document but also of those whose histories escape the Eurocentric standards of historical documentation. Too often in our quest for inclusion and diversity in our productions, we create representations that damage the very lives we seek to include. How much of that history did the actor playing Jim have to ignore to "play the truth of the scene?" What...