Allan Appel Photo
Actors Davis, Kulp, Warner-Crane, Singleton, as German soldiers, shouting “More resources for everyone!”
When the fast-rising, Yale-educated playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury was casting about for material that grabbed her, she came across a record of one of the earliest genocides of the murderous 20th century: the extermination of the Herero tribe of Namibia by the occupying Germans around 1915.
Yet the conventional play she wrote was, by her own determination, awful.
Yet she didn’t give up. She turned that experience into a new play whose structure is a play within a play: a play about how difficult, impossible, mind-bending, and even hysterically funny it can be to write a play about race, culture, and genocide.
We are lucky enough to have the absorbing result — We Are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, between the Years 1884 – 1915, as the season opener of the Collective Consciousness Theatre (CCT).
“I am a Herero man,” calls out Singleton’s character, “cattle, land, and fire.”
The show runs Thursdays through Sundays from Nov. 5 to Nov. 21 at the company’s intimate stage Building 6 West in Erector Square.
When Dexter Singleton, Collective Consciousness’s artistic director, saw a 2012 production in New York — helmed by the Long Wharf’s Eric Ting at Soho Rep — he said he was “floored” by the power of the play, especially a hold-your-breath coup de theatre moment at the play’s end, and the play’s ability to explore these much explored subjects in a unique way.
“We’re really trying to blur the line between theater and reality,” said Jenny Nelson, who directs.
So when you walk into the theater you might not at first realize the person sitting nearby, or perhaps in the corner, going through his backpack, is one of the actors who is playing an actor getting ready to run through the lines of the play, which is the play you are already seeing.
Michelle Burns as a cat in “the worst improv ever” sequence.
Got that? You will, and it will definitely be worth the trip.
The play’s structure alternates between scenes of actors trying to figure out how to put on such a sensitive play — this is the behind-the-scenes part — and the actual result presented to you, the audience.
During the behind-the-scenes moments, which are announced as “process”, the actors, who are simply called Black Actor, White Actor, or Another White Man, and are numbered, become confused, fatigued, embarrassed, and even horrified at their own attitudes about race, culture, and genocide.
During the presentation moments, we see the often gaping discrepancies of feeling and fact between how we discuss such matters in public and how we felt about them, viewed moments before in the actors’ process.
If this sounds complicated, it is, and it’s a challenge for the actors — both the veterans of the company like Singleton and actors new to CCT like Tenisi Davis. The actors play multiple roles. They have to learn German accents and how African tribesmen talk. And there’s a lot of physicality.
Davis, who studied acting at Housatonic Community College, where Singleton has been a long-time theater teacher, said he went on YouTube to check out German accents, as he plays, among other roles, a German soldier of the period.
“I’m going to try to bring some Angela Merkel to the play,” he joked.
He also said he checked out Nelson Mandela speeches on YouTube to practice an African accent.
A deeper challenge to him, he said, is playing a character unlike himself in profound ways; he’s basically a non-violent guy by nature, and one of his characters commits utterly brutal acts.
“It’s definitely a boundary pusher,” said another of the actors new to the company, Griffin Kulp, who plays Actor #1 White Man.
At a time of generalized urgency and fatigue in talking about race and culture matters, this play, by measure of the gripping and also hysterically funny scenes I saw in a run-through, is a kind of tonic.
While the play-within-a-play is a theater staple, from Shakespeare to Noises Off, there’s a touch of brilliance in having the behind-the-scenes subject of the play one that is often, well, behind the scenes of so much of our consciousness, to our peril.
Burns and Raynetta Woods trying to figure out how to present the presentation.
If there’s such a thing as comic relief about race, culture, and genocide — and there must be or else we all burst — then this play has found it through the unique lens Drury helps us see it through.
“In some ways, it [the play] is a love letter to the artistic process. In the end it’s like Hamlet, ‘to hold the mirror up to nature,’” said Nelson.
This is one of the reasons why theater, when done like this, remains so essential. The very modestly priced tickets are available here.
The others actors in the play, not mentioned above, include Michelle Burns, Ethan Warner-Crane, and Raynetta Woods.
