I was enchanted by Claudia Rankine’s smile.
Even though this was our second interview together (the first was by phone), and we have several friends in common, I was still surprised by her welcoming hug and warmth when we met at a conference room in the Shed three weeks before the world premiere of her play “Help” there on March 10. Forty minutes later, I realized that after years of teaching her poetry, especially “Citizen,” her book-length poem on American race relations, my mind somehow had constructed Rankine as reserved, scolding and confrontational.
I left our conversation even more out of sorts as I asked myself: “If I, as a black woman, could so easily misread Claudia Rankine, what hope is there for any white man not to do the same?”
This dilemma — between the racial and gender stereotypes that our society projects onto black women and how they have to reject those roles in order to assert their own identities — is the central conflict of “Help.” Commissioned by the Shed, New York City’s new $475 million arts center that is now in its second season at Hudson Yards, the play is partly based on Rankine’s New York Times Magazine article from last July, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”
In that essay, Rankine described her repeated experiences being rendered invisible by white men as they waited in first-class lines together at the airport, and her attempts to ask other white men sitting next to her in the intimate and elite space of the airplane cabin how they perceive their own white privilege. “I wondered, what is this ‘stuckness’ inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies?” she wrote. “I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.”
Rankine explained why she chose the transitory setting of air travel. “It was the only time where I found myself sort of thrown in intimacy, if I wanted it, with random white men who were, just through proximity, there,” she said in our interview. “Sometimes you’re on these long flights, you’re exhausted, and you’ve done whatever you were going to do or you’re on your way to do it. And people are willing to just sort of launch, partly to let the time pass and partly because you’re drinking a lot. Both things are happening at the same time.”
In response to the piece, Rankine received over 2,000 comments on the Times website and more than 200 letters or emails sent to her at Yale University. White men who wanted to engage in the debate or explain why they took offense to her characterizations made up the majority of the correspondence.
“There are these letters that are three pages in which somebody sat down and wrote, ‘Dear Professor Rankine’ or ‘Dear Claudia Rankine,’ This is my life. This is what you’re not thinking about,” she said. “As I read through most of them, I realized that I’m talking about privilege as a way of being, period. The ability to live, the ability to be alive in the world. And they’re talking about privilege as making money. I hadn’t really understood that disconnect until I actually parsed all of those letters.”
She went on, “It made me go back and think about what felt so offensive about ‘All Lives Matter.’ White people start with that as a given. And because they’re white, they don’t understand that black people are starting with, ‘Will my life matter? Can my life matter? Does my life matter?’ And so that step backward into nonbeing is not one they’ve had to take.”
“So they don’t understand why you’re addressing it,” she concluded. “I don’t think it’s willful aggression. I think it is symptomatic of whiteness in and of itself, that they don’t have to think about it, so they don’t think about it, and they think you’re being presumptuous by asking them about their lives.”
With “Help,” unlike her plays that were first conceived for performance — “The Provenance of Beauty” at the Foundry in 2009, and “The White Card” at American Repertory Theater in 2018 — Rankine had taken on the task of dramatizing an already well-circulated essay.
To do so, she reinvented herself as the Narrator, a middle-aged black air traveler played by Roslyn Ruff (“Fairview”), and created 20 white male characters who are on the plane with her. Rankine said that “90 percent of what is spoken by the white men in the script” is taken from the letters she received.
She drew the rest of the script from interviews and an assortment of writings and statements by the black feminist theorists Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, the Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the civil rights activist Ruby Sales and President Trump, as well as a video of police diversity training in Plainfield, Ind.
It then fell on Rankine, and a diverse artistic team led by the director Taibi Magar, to turn that prose into a full-fledged theater experience. Or, as Magar suggested to me in an interview, something else entirely.
“Sometimes I come home from rehearsal and I’m like, ‘Is it theater?’ I’m not even sure,” Magar said. “‘Is it performance art?’ Sometimes she’s creating a poem onstage, sometimes we’re referencing a lot of stand-up. What has been exciting for me to embrace is that its form does not feel traditional.”
She continued, “This is important to me in plays about confronting racism. We really have to shake up our narratives in order to see a black woman’s reality.”
At the Tuesday afternoon rehearsal I attended, I caught a glimpse of what Magar meant. In a scene choreographed by Shamel Pitts, as the white male actors frenetically danced around an empty airline seat meant for the Narrator with movements that referenced everything from gyrated hips to Hitler salutes, it felt a bit like a vaudeville flash mob. And because both Rankine and Ruff were out at a photo shoot, I was one of two black women in the room, heightening my sense of being overtaken by the actors’ whiteness and maleness.
In many ways, that is the point. Recent productions like “Slave Play,” “Fairview” and “Toni Stone” have all explicitly taken on the white gaze. By doing so, they risked reproducing the very racial hierarchy in the audience that they sought to criticize onstage.
When I asked Magar if she was worried about focusing on whiteness at the expense of the Narrator or the black people in the theater, she said, “We’re not centering whiteness in the ways that it’s centered in our culture. Whiteness is the problem, and whites are the ones who need to fix themselves. So you sort of need to center them.”
Before leaving, however, Magar reminded me that the play ultimately revolves around Rankine’s character, and that Magar and Ruff worked hard to always remind the audience that a black woman lies at the center of this work. In one scene, a white man steps in front of the Narrator without excusing himself or acknowledging her. By having Ruff stand next to her empty space in the line, her character’s invisibility is rendered hypervisible for the audience.
Ruff admitted that at first she was hesitant to accept the part of the Narrator, the sole black woman among so many white men.
“After having an intense two years with ‘Fairview,’ I really had to have a conversation with myself about taking on this narrative, subject matter, and this theme again,” she said, “because sometimes it can just be a bit much.”
Ruff noted that she can’t just switch off the story when she leaves the Shed.
“I am navigating that world as myself on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “This ‘work’ is my life, my personal life, when I go home, turn on the television, watch CNN or MSNBC, and deal with the climate that we’re in right now.”
Ruff also recognized that much of what Rankine wanted in her essay — an honest interracial conversation about white male privilege — has already taken place among the cast and crew as they prepare for opening night. In the beginning, Ruff said, some of her castmates would offer “a defense” of one of the white men’s comments in the script, derived from the letters to Rankine.
“That was fascinating,” she said, and sometimes led to “a reflective moment. An ‘OK. Wait a minute.’ And a real realization that in their defensiveness, that, too, is privilege at work.”
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
