Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Theatre department cancels Beast Thing
The Williams Record: On Thursday, the theatre department announced the cancellation of its production of the play Beast Thing. The show, written by Aleshea Harris and described by the department as a “play-in-progress,” contained controversial and potentially traumatizing content and was directed in a manner that consistently left many participants feeling uncomfortable, leading to its cancellation. The play was directed by Visiting Assistant Professor in Theatre Shayok Misha Chowdhury, who previously directed The Wolves in the fall of 2017.
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3 comments:
Is this play written for student of color? For some reason I feel like this director had a savior complex, and wanted the students of color to “have a voice”, and the students said this themselves, they didn’t feel like they were part of the creative process, but some mere tools for the directors purpose. I understand how sometimes the voices of minority students get drowned by the loud voice of the majority, but forcing students to have a voice backfires. Is like trying to get people angry at their situation without actually making any institutional changes. I think the fact that half the cast walked away within the first weeks of rehearsals, it should’ve been a huge red flag. In addition to this, I feel like most schools tend to be more lenient with guest directors, who push students to the breaking point, for the sake of connections and good standing.
All around it seems like this process was wrought with issues since the beginning, even from the point of it being selected. Giving a platform for students of color is a great idea, but then it doesn’t make sense that they then brought on a majority white cast. Williams College is a predominantly white college in a predominantly white town, so making students of color feeling alienated in a space that was supposed to be for them. One of the things that I found the most upsetting was the amount of mental energy and time these students were expected to dedicate to this project. Yes, their rehearsal schedule was fewer hours a week than ours, but Williams is a much more academically focused school where students aren’t (and shouldn’t be) expected to be on production as much. The fact that a student was asked to skip a family member’s funeral is insane to me. I got sick during tech last week and I went home to take care of myself, so if I as the SM could step on than this student be able to as well. Even last year we had a student get sick right before opening and the director stepped in to play his part. Overall I think that in this case cancelling was the right choice, but I hope that the school takes a long hard look at this process and learns from it.
I often think about the appropriateness of a story to a context, and I consider whether it is the best way to accomplish whatever broader goal might exist, and I consider whether the people telling it are the best people for the job. In this case, I think the goal of the director seemed so important that it completely obscured the other two parts of the issue. Although I haven’t read the play, I can imagine that it necessitates an extremely intense rehearsal process, and would probably benefit best from a team that could focus on it exclusively for the duration of the production. In other words, not students working amidst a thousand other obligations, who would likely frequently have to leave rehearsal abruptly without any sort of cooldown or exodus exercise to help them clear their minds of the work (I’m obviously not a director, but I think they do these sorts of things?). Finally, it’s pretty clear from the comments from the people involved that these particular students were suffering from the process, and the director neither understood nor cared, and he seems to have misunderstood the environment at Williams as a whole.
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