Notes from the Field
Chosen by Rachel De-lahay
A revival to make sense of the world right now, for me, would be Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show Notes from the Field. The most simplistic production saw two hours of Anna on a bare stage, sometimes backed with video footage, introducing us to the 15 or so characters she interviewed about what it was like to live in a “broken system” in the US. We met young men subjected to racial profiling, Indigenous people driven to crimes by flawed systems and adversity, but when a schoolgirl bore witness to the battering of her young, black friend, whose body was flung across the classroom by a white officer, I broke. Anna wasn’t performing these characters, she was presenting them. It felt like I bore witness to the information first hand and I guess, in truth, the reason I found it difficult to breathe during this show was because the similarities to the UK were uncanny.
Little Baby Jesus
Chosen by Justin Audibert
I first came across Arinzé Kene’s Little Baby Jesus when curating a series of extracts to be performed by schoolchildren to celebrate the opening of the Black Plays Archive. The play jumped off the page with a startling immediacy. The writing was muscular yet lyrical, the characters hilarious, fragile and just a little bit filthy. Above all else it captured with brilliant veracity the fizzing impulses and emotional contradictions of being a teenager. The students from a north London comprehensive school performing the piece connected with it instantly. They saw their own reality reflected back to them. A reality in which Joanne, Kehinde and Rugrat have to grow up far too quickly. A reality where the intersection of class, race, mental health and gender is truly brutal. A reality where the three black teenage protagonists live under a perpetual shadow of impending violence. Now, in the context of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests, we can see that this shadow of violence on black bodies is cast primarily by the state. Real talk.
The Scottsboro Boys
Chosen by Charlene James
“I’m calling the cops. I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Those were the chilling words caught on video of a white woman, Amy Cooper, after Chris Cooper, a black man, asked her to remove her unleashed dog from a protected area of New York’s Central Park.
The escalation of her calculated hysteria when on the phone to the cops was astounding. A dramatic performance that for this innocent, unarmed black man could have been life-threatening.
Amy Coooper’s harmful actions echoed the behaviour of some of the white women before her who have used their whiteness to hurt black males. I was reminded of the musical The Scottsboro Boys. The story of nine black teenage boys who were falsely accused of rape by Victoria Price and Ruby Bates in Alabama in 1931 as they rode the freight train. John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical, with a book by David Thompson, tells the devastating effects the women’s transgressions had on these boys and shines a light on an uncomfortable part of history that is worthy of discussion, now more than ever.
Yellowman
Chosen by Roy Williams
Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman is a striking play that deals with racism within a black community in South Carolina. It’s set around the love between a young black woman who is dark-skinned and her childhood friend who is of black parentage but very light-skinned – hence the title “Yellowman”, a phrase often aimed at mixed-race people. The style of the writing is surreal and poetic. It’s powerful as well, as the two protagonists struggle to have a normal life but are always judged on the colour of their skin, even by their own community. That is not an argument for “black people are racists too”, no way. But by presenting prejudice that exists within a black community, Orlandersmith is showing us the bigger picture: how toxic, cruel and soul-destroying racism can be and that the legacy of slavery is still something this entire word has not yet come to terms with. Black Lives Matter.
