The Hegemony of Drama
I hold my heart in my hands letting my blood freely flow
Ira B. Jones, "the sign of
freedom"
only fools don't intimately know ghosts,
the dna of
humanity, leaping like porpoises slick out of the sea
Kalamu
ya Salaam, "Ghosts"
Cognitive restructuring of behaviors through moral
justification and palliative characterizations is the most effective
psychological mechanism for promoting destructive conduct. (172)
Albert
Bandura. "Mechanisms of moral disengagement. " Origins of Terrorism. Ed. Walter Reich.
Washington,
D C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998. 161-191.
If you are an American of a certain age and ethnic group, it
is possible to reread Bill Gunn's Black
Picture Show (Berkeley: Reed,
Cannon and Johnson, 1975) and have an overdose of nostalgia . There actually was a time when every movement or word was not a performance? The poetic language of Gunn's play reminds
you it was once possible to discriminate what was pretense from what was
intended to be serious. Contemporary
culture minimizes such discrimination.
The world is not like a stage; the world is a stage. The Renaissance metaphor has lost its
charm. The metaphor is plain, ugly fact.
Under these circumstances, your rereading of the play is a
performance, an involuntary admission that what Black Picture Show depicts is the thin line between the insanity of
what is normal in 2016 and recognition, possible way back in 1975, that certain abnormal entrapments were not alien in the worlds of American theatre.
Over a period of forty years, the rules of the game you play with race cards
have changed very little. Assisted by
technological changes and American moral regression, the rules have become more
deadly.
In a gripping bit of monologue, Alexander, the poet/playwright/protagonist,
recites
Some piece of European truth
that has dearly come apart
emaciates my blood
and manipulates
my heart.
I have come to understand
through the accident of stress
that art devoid of me is
genocide
at best. (82)
Alexander sends a most discomforting "truth"
about art into your ears. Alexander's
words, like those which challenge and tantalize you in some plays by Adrienne
Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks, an absence or gap of meaning that is not filled
by the critically acclaimed plays of August Wilson or by the overwhelming
popular productions in several genres of works by Tyler Perry. You begin to
think about the probable crisis of art in America.
Through distress
you gaze into an abyss with stoic awareness that you and people like you
signify nothing, or signify a lot that has come to mean very little. Your exaggerated sentiments are grounds for
claiming that the paucity of serious discussion of plays by African Americans
from 1975 to now is a flaw in the production/performance of how we ought to
account for black writing. You are
thinking of plays that get reviewed nowhere.
The hegemony of drama in our social and political lives
seems to have silenced our voices about Black
Picture Show and kindred plays that
seek to create rather than merely perform emancipating languages. Why do we so
willing swallow whatever panders to our foibles? We have not been sufficiently
proactive in calling out the hegemony of
drama for the obscenity that it is, or in cursing about the moral disengagement so highly prized and rewarded by the Academy
and the Establishment. We have not
fought hard enough to create conversations about the work, let us say, of
Harold E. Clark, a New Orleans playwright who is morally engaged. Those of us
who say we are deeply interested in black writing must, unfortunately, live
with our complicity in being performed
by theory and praxis into self-destructive conduct.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January 10, 2016
