In 2018, the play Fairview written by Black playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury opened on Broadway. What starts out as a play about a nice Black, middle-class family hosting a family dinner to celebrate their matriarch quickly takes a turn as the audience learns that a group of white people has been watching the family the entire time and eventually infiltrates their celebration while masquerading as Black. At the end of the Third and final Act, Keisha, a teenage Black girl whose family is at the center of this play, takes control of the story and says,
They’re bright aren’t they?
Should I tell them that the lights are
there
to help people see them,
not to help them see anything?
So I could be out down here with all
my people of color?
With all my colorful people?
And we could be all of us together
alone?
And if I were to be out here with my
colorful people,
could I tell us a story?
If I were out here, just us, I’d want to
tell us a story.
A story about ending.
Or about leaving.
Or about remaining.
And about how they’re all the same thing
if the same people do them.
But that’s not the story I want to tell
us all.
If I could tell the story I want to tell us,
my people,
my colorful people,
you would hear it
if I could tell it,
and it would be something like
a story about us, by us, for us, only us.
But that’s not telling the story (97-98)
This powerful meditation about the stories people of color would tell “if we could be all of us together alone” doubles as a literal message to the audience watching and a metatheatrical critique of the dramatic arts. When Keisha says “Should I tell them the lights are there for people to see them, not to help them see anything” she is talking about, but not to, white people. Keisha refers to people of color with the more personable first person plural pronoun “we” and white people with the more impersonal third person plural pronoun “they”. Right off the bat, Keisha wants to inform white audience members that this show is not for them. This choice to address people of color directly and white people indirectly subverts the traditional theatrical habit of centering white people and white voices at the expense of everyone else,
Keisha’s desire to tell stories “about ending. Or about leaving. Or about remaining. And about how they’re all the same thing if the same people do them” feels like a pointed critique at the kind of stories that are always told about white people, and never about people of color. When stories of depth and complexity are only ever given to white people, while stories of perpetual trauma and violence are the only stories about people of color that white people are willing to listen to, everything starts to seem the same. There is a fundamental loss of knowledge and creativity when we try to pigeonhole people of color into only fitting certain narratives and refuse to listen when they try to say anything else.
Anyone who claims to care about including the stories and voices of people of color in the dramatic arts should be using the standard that Keisha offers to assess whether the work they are writing, producing, or participating in actually uplifts and acknowledges people of color.
The question, “is this the kind of story that people of color would want to share if they were all alone?” is a powerful heuristic that if even the most “race conscious” works were measured up against, they’d likely come up short.
William Shakespeare is no exception. While Shakespeare has a number of plays that include themes of race, from Othello to The Tempest, the one I want to measure against Keisha’s standard for telling stories about people of color is Titus Andronicus. Titus Andronicus is a play about Titus Andronicus, a Roman general who returns home after 10 years of war with a bride for the Roman Emperor, Tamora, who secretly has a Moorish lover, Aaron. This play is a tragedy that ends in immeasurable amounts bloodshed but not before the Roman Emperor, Saturninus, tries to kill the mixed-race baby his wife, Tamora, and Aaron secretly conceived. In the first scene of Act Five, as he tries to save his baby’s life, Aaron is asked if he regrets his “heinous deeds” and he says,
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death;
Ravish a maid or plot the way to do it;
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself;
Set deadly enmity between two friends;
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and haystalks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digged up dead men from their graves
And set them upright at their dear friends’ door,
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters
‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead’
But I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5.1.126-146)
In his final monologue, Aaron freely accepts his fate regretting, not what he did do, but all the things he won’t get to do once he dies. He could have plead to Lucius, the son of Titus, begging for mercy before he killed him, but instead he mocks him, fully embracing the worst stereotypes of Black men as a threat to the safety of white communities, and particularly the sexual safety of white women when he says he curses the days, where he didn’t get a chance to “ravish a maid or plot the way to do it”. Aaron is probably the character of color in all the Shakespearian canon with the most individual agency. He is not driven mad like Othello nor is he a monster like Caliban. Aaron speaks freely and often angrily to express his disdain for others. Some would argue its Shakespeare’s most progressive portrayal of race.
In the end, though, what really matters is how it measures up against Keisha’s standard. Is this the kind of story people of color would tell to each other if they were all alone together? I do not think so. Titus Andronicus while it has its moments does not tell a story that hasn’t already been told and won’t be told many times after. Aaron is telling a story that is for a white audience, not “a story about us, by us, for us, only us” (Drury, 97). While defiantly embodying stereotypes without regard for what white people think and sacrificing your own life to your baby’s life can be powerful, Aaron is not an example of theatrical liberation or subversion. Portraying violence against Black bodies is one of mainstream dramatic literature’s favorite pastimes, even though it is well past the time we find new and truly liberating stories to tell written by someone other than a long-dead, white guy who lived in Elizabethan era England.
It is too easy and often false to problematize early modern texts as racist simply because there were no people of color in them.
As the works of Shakespeare and so many other early modern writers shows, they had a great deal to say about race. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t say anything, but that most of what they said, thought, and wrote about race was deeply harmful and informed by vicious stereotypes that serve to embolden white supremacist ideologies.
We have to move beyond the idea that racial inclusion in the highest form of racial justice when it comes to literary drama, or anything for that matter. Inclusion merely for inclusion’s sake is not an act of liberation. Amplifying the voices of the unheard is liberation. Giving space to those who have never had any to themselves is liberation. We can begin to have real and meaningful conversations about race in the dramatic arts when we stop listening to the likes of William Shakespeare and start listening to the likes of Jackie Sibblies Drury, and the voices of Black girls everywhere that she is amplifying.