The Blacks: A Clown Show, running this weekend at The Ark on East Campus, pushes the questions and boundaries of race and theater in ways Duke's campus has never seen before. Written by Jean Genet as a play-within-a-trial-within-a-play, an all-black cast (well, in this case, almost all-black) re-enacts the rape and murder of a white woman for a mock court of other black actors, masked, costumed and dialectically performing as white aristocrats.
Heavy stuff? Sure, but what would be upsetting in any show becomes, in The Blacks, an all-out assault. In performances around the world, audience members walking out is par for the course. Directors Mary Adkins and Amy Eason stage the show environmentally, with actors wandering through the audience before the performance and striding through during it. Using language, staging and a variety of theatrical tricks, the actors assert control not only over the stage, but the entire theater and its occupants as well.
Adkins and Eason saw a production of The Blacks while studying on the Duke in New York program and decided to produce it at Duke while sitting on Adkins' bed, discussing the show.
"As Duke grads, the financial conditions of our prospective futures are, literally, about 20 times that of someone who works at Wal-Mart." Adkins said. "But the problem is that we've inherited this sense of power, so that we have no idea what life is like in its absence, what life is like for many, many people in America today. Until [you] attend The Blacks. Then, you know. At least for two hours."
The implications of The Blacks are intense and provoking--that black and white racial identities are as much performances as any scripted role; that faces, whatever their appearance, are masks; and that the racial climate that made The Blacks so affecting in 1961, when James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou first performed it in the United States, has changed so little that the play's power has only increased.
The Blacks runs tomorrow at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. in The Ark on East Campus. There will be a discussion following Sunday's performance at 5 p.m. in the Richard White Auditorium. Tickets are $5.
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