Racial Drama Onstage and Racial Tension Backstage at Seattle Rep

Theater - The Stranger: In 1970, James Baldwin (one of the best writers America has ever produced) and anthropologist Margaret Mead (the only anthropologist America has ever heard of) recorded a passionate and prescient seven-and-a-half-hour conversation, which was later turned into the book A Rap on Race. In a show with the same title, created by Spectrum Dance Theatre, now running at Seattle Rep, Tony Award–nominated local choreographer Donald Byrd and MacArthur genius playwright/performer Anna Deavere Smith reproduced sections of Baldwin and Mead's long-form, heady, booze-buoyed discussion and cut it with spurts of drunk-jazz dance numbers.