By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com
photo by Tim Fuller
Cast members play many roles in this fusion of theater, music, movement and video imagery.
Examples of “everyday racism” is how The Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre describes the content of its current offering, “Citizen: An American Lyric.” It has been adapted to the stage by Stephen Sachs from the internationally acclaimed and awards-winning 2014 book of poetry and prose by Claudia Rankine.
Directing this production is Dawn McMillan, employing six actors in a fusion of theater, music, movement and video imagery. The play itself eschews any narrative of characters and plot, becoming instead a collection of snapshots and vignettes that shape a “meditation on the acts of everyday racism.”
That phrase deserves repeating because it is the perfect description. Sachs the playwright doesn't even give his actors distinguishing names, only ordinary numbers. The players are: Citizen 1 – Myani Watson; Citizen 2 – Gianbari Deebom; Citizen 3 – Myron Crowe; Citizen 4 – Lance Guzman; Citizen 5 – China Young; Citizen 6 – Zachary Austin.
Together they create a continuous string of scenes, some brief, some longer and more complex, portraying one's daily life of a thousand painful cuts that become a shameful gamut of exhausting endurance forced upon black people by white people.
Deebom also creates a string of heart wrenching scenes depicting the challenges of tennis star Serena Williams earlier in her career, when she seemed to be getting more than her share of penalty calls from the umpires and line judges, who were white.
But “Citizen” gets its true power by developing a convincing sense of what that never-ending nagging and nibbling must feel like. How nobody ever talks about it but everybody, black or white, knows it is happening.
The scenes include believing all white people think all black people look the same, that white people resent affirmative action programs for black people, that on a bus or subway car white people will resent sitting next to black people, that police officers at a crime scene always look for black people to blame.
Each example is presented as a sincere plea for justice, a weariness for ever finding fair play in today's society. Probably every white person sitting in Scoundrel & Scamp's audience will genuinely believe they would never personally commit any of these egregious acts.
But somebody white is doing them, or else they would not have a page in Rankine's book. So who are these white people? Are they acting like pleasant family folk at the grocery store who love everybody?
For all audiences “Citizen” will bring a new depth to their awareness of these situations, a view that racism has always been so common for so long it is invisible...unless you are black.
“Citizen: An American Lyric” runs through May 29, is suggested for audiences age 18+. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, in the Historic Y, 738 N. Fifth Ave. The run time is about 75 minutes.
Tickets are $30 general admission, $28 seniors 65+, $15 student and teacher, $15 theater artist. Order tickets online, scoundrelandscamp.org, phone 520-448-3300, email boxoffice@scoundrelandscamp.org.
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