[NEohioPAL] Cleveland Plain Dealer 4/22/08: Karamu Theatre's creepy and brilliant "The Blacks" are coming to getcha!

Tue Apr 22 14:10:59 PDT 2008

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In review: Three theaters tackle tricky topics of race and gender

by Tony Brown / <mailto:tbrown at plaind.com>  Plain Dealter Theater Critic 

Tuesday April 22, 2008, 2:51 PM

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Karamu Theatre 

The young lady in question wears a torsolette, lacy-thighed stockings and
stilettos. An afterthought of a skirt hides little of the panties beneath. A
fedora cocked over her ravenous eyes, her lips parted, she runs a finger up
a leg of my jeans. 

The blacks in Karamu Theatre's creepy and brilliant "The Blacks" are coming
to getcha -- and all those stereotypes you secretly harbor and would just as
soon not have to deal with.

Oh. She's black. I'm white. 

That moment didn't take place in a strip club or a hotel room, but it did
send lascivious synapses pinging around my aging neuro-system. It took place
in Karamu Theatre's production of Jean Genet's 1958 masterpiece "The Blacks:
A Clown Show," between an actor (her) and audience member (me). On top of
the smutty reflexes was the realization that I was projecting onto her what
"they" say about black women, and I was fulfilling what "they" say about
white men.

We were living out our stereotypes, of each other and ourselves, dancing a
dance called by dark, primordial forces from our clannish collective
unconscious. The moment was the pinnacle of a weekend of drama in Cleveland
about race and gender that comes just as the race- and gender-charged
Democratic presidential primary process slogs a step closer to a messy
resolution of its ugly-looking end game. 

"The Blacks," produced brilliantly at Karamu Theatre, was joined by "This Is
How it Goes," about truth, fiction and an interracial love triangle, at The
Bang and the Clatter; and "In the Continuum," about HIV-infected black
women, here and in Africa, at Cleveland Public Theatre. 

Scary good

Genet, a white man from France, produced an amalgam of Theatre of Cruelty
and Absurdism, existentialism and Negritude, for a postcolonial world. 

It became the longest-running nonmusical play off-Broadway in the 1960s,
with James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett Jr. and Maya Angelou. 

A group of black actors re-enact the murder of a white woman for a group of
whites, played by black actors wearing white masks. It's meant to be played
to a white audience, or to blacks in white masks. 

At Karamu, artistic director Terrence Spivey and set designer John Konopka
put the action in our faces by cramming us on either side of a runway in the
tiny Arena Theatre. 

The result, thanks to fearless performances by actors masked literally (by
costume designer Harold Crawford) and figuratively, is downright creepy. The
creepiest thing is having to come to grips with our own racism. 

The cast performs delicious acts, scripted and not. Erin Neal sasses us with
her Angela Davis 'tude and 'fro. Saidah Mitchell reigns over all as an
African princess. Joseph Primes is a big, bad playa. As his girl, Andrea
Belser clings to him as tightly as her scanty lingerie clings to her. 

I could go on at length about the 13-member cast and still not capture all
that is bizarre and disturbing and fascinating about this daring adventure.
But the whole thing is best personified by Jason Dixon as the
clown-narrator, a leering, gape-mouthed nightmare. 

He's the black guy we white people lock our doors against. And we whites are
the people he locks his against. And onward we go, broken and bigoted, black
and white, raging and racist. 

Through Saturday, May 10, at 2355 East 89th St. $20-$25. 216-795-7077.

Read all three reviews online...
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2008/04/three_theaters_tack
le_tricky_t.html

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