Shepherdstown 2017: Race and Faith

Abstract

Shepherdstown 2017: Race and Faith Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) I’ve been following the Contemporary American Theater Festival for six seasons (often in these pages). Produced each July in Shepherdstown, WV, it focuses on new or nearly new full-length conventional plays (as distinct from musicals or from the “theater pieces” more associated with fringe theater) by contemporary American playwrights, mostly of the emerging variety (though there were productions of newer plays by the well-established Sam Sheppard and Neil LaBute in recent seasons). In other words, this is a proving ground for fare that may be headed for Off-Broadway and then regional theater, not for either Broadway or fringe festivals. CATF provides thoroughly professional conditions: Equity casts, top-notch sets, excellent acoustics, lavishness of costumes where it’s called for––in short (to borrow a phrase from the vocabulary of self-help books) it dresses the shows for the New York or regional theater job they want. There is a seriousness about the enterprise that might seem a bit conservative to some: no messing around with nontraditional casting, nothing fringe-y, limited fourth-wall violations. Those things might appear to some to be major components of the future of the American theater, but CATF exemplifies the present, a present which is not at all ready to consider itself vieux jeux. And in many ways, especially in the area of race, the Festival aggressively pushes the envelope. About half the shows in the last two seasons, for instance, had major and often challenging racial themes, and many of the playwrights were nonwhite. This season, without a doubt, the most racially charged entry was The Niceties, by Eleanor Burgess. The setup was simple: At a northeastern university that strongly resembles Yale, Janine, a middle-aged history [End Page 124] professor, goes over a paper with Zoe, an African American student. They differ, politely at first. Zoe’s thesis is that the American Revolution was a moderate one not because of the statesmanship of the Founding Fathers but because those who waged it had no desire to right the wrong of slavery and fix the fundamental problems of American society. Janine demurs. She argues that historians must work with the primary data available, and that everything not found in such data must be ignored. Because nothing that might support Zoe’s conclusions stands out in the primary data, she reasons, there is no good reason to subscribe to Zoe’s conclusions. Janine’s initial lines come across as measured, rational, and supremely composed. Zoe’s initial riposte, almost as measured, is that this neat construct consigns us to relying entirely on the voices of white men, history’s winners, who had a nearly exclusive ability to create the record and were unreliable narrators. To Zoe, Janine’s utter dismissal of her theory ignores self-evident truths of human nature, which should be evidence enough. As the discussion grows more heated, leading to a crisis that leaks out of the professor’s office, it becomes both a proxy for and a microcosm of the larger disputes around race in our country. In the second act (I almost wrote “the second round”) Zoe accuses Janine of not being a suitable teacher. When Janine responds she earned her position, Zoe reminds Janine of all the reasons certain potential competitors may have fallen by the wayside on the way to earning that position: “[F]irst came 250 years of slavery, and then came a hundred years of segregation, and then came a deliberate and systematic attempt to exclude black people from good school districts and good jobs and to lock them up or hunt them down for doing things white people do every day. I need you to say that whatever else it stands for, America has systematically persecuted one part of its population, in a way that benefits the other part. In a way that has benefitted you. . . . You won fair and square cuz everyone else had lead boots on.” The fight culminates with Zoe demanding that Janine make personal reparations for the illegitimate benefit she has received. With the positions of the parties so lucidly laid out, this rather shocking demand seems...