Intermission Magazine: I like Chekhov. A lot. Take some relatively ordinary characters (think me or you), place them against a crumbling world (look outside, go online, look outside again), make their lives not quite amount to what they expected (look at us!) and you have the workings of play.
2 comments:
(this is from the day where the comments didn't work)
(God, I love that James Baldwin quote...)
I really appreciate this article for not mincing words and tackling a topic that a lot of people, even people who generally like to consider themselves socially conscious people, don't really like talking about because it makes them feel icky. When a person of color writes a play (or directs a movie, or paints a painting, or or or...), we tend to assume that the work is inherently ABOUT race or ethnicity. To use the example of the article: when Chekov writes about Russians, we understand that he's talking about Russians, but we all accept that he's making a deeper point about the human condition (and he is!). However, when Childress writes about Black people, we tend to isolate her observations to just that demographic. This is all downstream of conceiving of whiteness as the default and everything else a deviation from some untouched norm, which is always bad. So, yes, we should all be reading more Childress, no matter what we look like or who we know
I knew nothing about this play before reading the article but I am now DESPERATE to see it. YES! This is what we need right now. This is the type of theatre that awakes my desire to not just do theatre but to do theatre that I think helps. I love the idea of taking the really real and flawed style of character that Chekov popularized and expanding on that idea. Like I keep wondering if the rise of AI and stuff is a result of everything that was to ever be created already has been, and now computers are just using that to generate junk. But this is expanding on something that has already been created, and it’s coming from relating to these characters in a way that only a human being can. Not only that, but it’s expanding on what the human experience looks like for more people. This is for everyone.
I remember when I started to notice that I consumed more online content than I did works of fiction (like tv or movies), and I thought that maybe I just needed something that was real. I guess a work of fiction doesn’t mean it can’t be real.
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