Away From Mamet

99seats writes on Mamet beginning with an oft quoted passage from Race:

Mr. JAMES SPADER (Actor): (As Jack Lawson) There is nothing, a white person can say to a black person about race, which is not both incorrect and offensive. No. I know that. Race is the most incendiary topic in our history. And the moment it comes out, you cannot close the lid on that box. That may change, but not for a long, long while.

Mamet likes simple dichotomies. Rarely, for all of his verbal prowess, does he capture a world of any complexity. It is all or nothing. He is a shell of a formerly great writer, still able to turn a clever phrase, not willing to reach for greatness. He'd have to try, rather than phoning it in with an accompanying marketing piece in the New York Times.

In my humble opinion--as soon as you exclude people from a conversation solely because of how they look or where they were born, or their level of education, or their income, you immediately stop any chance of true progress.

Difficult conversations cannot be had in a vacuum--there has to be openness for it to go both ways, or progress cannot happen. That's true in every part of the world.

I can't ever say what it is like to be a black man; however, I do know very well what it is like to be an outsider in a foreign country and think "are they treating me this way because I'm American?"

Or to be the only white person in a neighborhood deeply mistrustful of whites and think "Are they treating me this way because I'm white?"

Or to be the only one whose native language is English and think "Are they treating me this way because I don't speak their language?"

I can't ever say what it is like to be a black man; however, there are common experiences that can be grasped across color lines.

I also grew up around some very outwardly racist people. My father was just about as racist as you can be, and I knew people that I'm pretty sure are/were in white supremacist groups.

But, I also know that most of the people I knew were not racist. Or they changed their views once they actually met someone who was different than them. “White people” may not be able to grasp the “Black Experience”; but just as there is no one black experience, there is no one white people.

I am not ignorant enough to think we are in a post-racial anything. But if no one is willing to find common ground, progress is near impossible. If folks are too busy waiting for the other person to reach out a hand to shake, progress is near impossible.

Most of us are in the same boat. The systems of inequality are not tied to color. We are told that the white majority oppresses the black minority. But the dominant power structure includes some blacks, and excludes many whites.

Five minutes listening to Eastern European immigrants or poor white kids in a trailer park would make that pretty clear. There are a lot more similarities between people than differences.

We all have different connections to the swirl of chaos and pain that is life. Most Americans have felt loss, have felt like an outsider, have been hurt and have felt anger and frustration at a system that is unfairly rigged so that a very few have benefited from the many. There is common ground that can be built on - if we look for it.

Without many different voices being willing and able to listen; to talk; to make mistakes; to learn, progress is near impossible.

The true legacy of slavery is that it enveloped everyone. There were black slave owners and white abolitionists wearing cotton clothes made with slave labor. Ships built from wood that was cut by men just trying to make their way, and put together by shipbuilders just trying to feed their families, carried slaves captured by chiefs of rival groups in Africa through the middle passage.

The triangle of trade was globalism in its earliest, most morally bankrupt phase and it left a stain on everyone. It would be nearly impossible to escape the system. It was far from being as simple a dichotomy as we are usually told.

We live in a complex, nebulous fabric woven from interconnectedness and perceived oppositions. And yet Mamet's world, and how a rag he sneezed in would be picked up by theatres around the country, is an apt metaphor for many of the conversations we have amongst bloggers and with audiences, and for much of what is thrown up on our stages. We avoid complexity, instead relaxing into repeating the arguments we know well. Lashing out at others we don't understand and all claiming the high moral ground.

Race is the most incendiary topic I know of in America. It is not as simple as black or white. There is an entire range of humanity fumbling for connection. And our theatre and many of our artists seem to be incapable of fumbling towards a conversation.

I know what it is like to feel lost in a sea of corn, alone and isolated, when no one around seems like you. I know what it is like to feel lost in a sea of faces, alone and isolated, when no one around knows you. Everyone I know has felt that. Love and Loss, Loneliness and Fulfillment, Isolation and Connection are the great dichotomies of humanity.

And yet while we can speak in great rhetoric of how art can expose the human condition, do any of us know what the human condition means? We speak of how great artists have the ability to bare the nakedness of our souls, but do we examine ourselves enough to know what we contain?

I have said before that a healthy theatre should be a gathering place, like the town-squares of old; one that provokes and entertains, wounds and heals, challenges and affirms. We need to open the closed-loop of theatre folk primarily/solely doing theatre for other theatre folk. The image of the lone artist needs to give way to the image of an artist communicating with his/her community. If theatre can truly peer into our collective consciousness, our nightmares and ecstasies, the tragic and comic—it must be done collectively.

Jenn, though not Jewish, used to work at a synagogue that every year has a fantastic children's gospel choir sing for MLK day. When I first heard of it I scoffed. The notion of a temple having an MLK day celebration seemed to be exactly the trivial sort of gesture most of my black friends cringe at. “One day a year is better than none, but really?”

But then the Rabbi told me why they do it, to celebrate the speech Dr. King gave at the temple when he was in Chicago. I had no idea this had happened and had never seen or heard anything about it.

I can't find the text, I'll see if I can get a copy from the Rabbi. There is a phrase in the speech he gave that, for me, towers over the rest of his formidable legacy. He began by saying there is a great deal of anti-antisemitism in the black community he knew, and that it is wrong, for: “anti-antisemitism is not anti-Jew, it is anti-human and anti-God.”

We are all human, and yet if we allow a Mametian worldview-- overtly simplistic, provoking for a mere punchline, cruelty without the possibility of redemption, shame without the possibility for honor, with clever turns of phrase disguising mere caricatures and an unwillingness to challenge our own assumptions-- to pervade our stages and online communication, we rob ourselves of the richness that makes our stories, our theatre, and our communication remarkable.