Monday, March 04, 2019
We Need More Nuanced Depictions of Black Women on Stage
Theatre Development Fund – TDF: As a theatre critic, I see wide variety of shows about a multitude of subjects. But as a black woman, I am constantly confronted by the fact that the art form I adore often does not honor the experiences of people who look like me. Of the dozens of shows I've seen over the past six months, I can think of only a handful that had black female characters, and they were all subservient roles.
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Theater is a depiction of the present society. It needs to be truthful to the sentiments and scope of awareness of the people. And this article touches upon a matter of importance in the society today.
The depiction of other races has always been a controversial topic, given how misleading and disrespectful they can be sometimes. And black women have also faced the same depiction criterion in the past and continue to face so even today.
For long, they have either not been portrayed and shrugged aside, or have been portrayed as side-kicks to other characters. But what they deserve is a better representation of their thoughts and actions. More nuanced characters need to be written for black women that can depict the way they feel and how they react or act in different situations.
It is the need of the hour to portray every gender and race in their truest forms; unaffected by abything else taht anayone might want.
I’m obviously not a black woman, so I cannot speak to that experience, but growing up, I had similar feelings about the representation of immigrants on television and in American movies – I didn’t have much exposure to theater growing up, so I can’t really speak to that either, but I imagine it wasn’t much different. There is often one stereotype that is followed and every character, let’s say they’re Russian, because that’s as close to Bulgarian as I ever saw on TV, fits that stereotype. They’re either an aggressive drunk man, or a severe, slender woman with a thick accent. They’re usually depicted as scary or antagonistic in some way, often the villain. So though I am not a black woman, I understand what it feels like to see a representation of my ethnicity that I cannot relate to, and that is a caricature of my culture, if that.
Speaking even more generally, I recognize that misrepresentation or lack of representation altogether is a problem for all “minorities,” not just racial or ethnic, but also for the disabled. We are seeing a trend in the expanding the variety of stories that we choose to tell, but changes are happening slowly because it is difficult to change a system that has already been established. It’s difficult to unteach stereotypes. It’s difficult when writers are writing for characters that are not like them, so how would they no any better than to use those stereotypes if that’s the only exposure they’ve ever had to minority characters? Essentially, we need people to write stories they know, honest ones. That’s how we will get accurate representation, but first we have to start saying yes to people that are used to hearing no. And we’re getting there. I am proud to be a part of such a diverse generation of artists, and I feel like the work we will create in our lifetimes is going to be vastly different than the work being created now. The fact that these conversations are being had during the most formative artistic years of our lives is going to have a massive impact on our priorities and processes as we create in the future.
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