Brian Slattery Photo
Nelson on the set of Barbecue after rehearsal.
A family has gathered in a park. They’re worried about one of their siblings, who has yet to arrive. But it’s clear each of them has their own problems, too. Their conversation is fraught with personal history, some of it harrowing, most of it hilarious.
There’s a scene break. Now the family is back — same pavilion in a park, same cooler, same grill, same clothes. Except that now, all the family members are Black. They pick up right where the White family left off. As if they’re the same family, but different too. Something weird is going on.
The same family, somehow switching back and forth between Black and White, is the initial conceit at the heart of Barbecue, by Robert O’Hara, which had its world premiere at the Public Theater in 2015 and has been produced slowly but steadily ever since. It’s a sharp comedy that, in the first couple scenes, plays almost like a smarter, deeper version of the 2016 Saturday Night Live skit in which a MAGA-hat-wearing older White guy holds his own (until he suddenly doesn’t) on the fictional game show Black Jeopardy, as it points out how, in ways large and small, financial struggle can create considerable commonalities between Black and White culture, even as differences also emerge. It’s everyone’s story.
Or is it? When the late sibling, the one the rest of the family is so worried about, finally arrives, things take a turn for the stranger. And then get stranger still. Then — in a turn this reporter will not spoil — a move at the end of the first act turns the whole play inside out, setting the way forward for a second act that forces the viewer to completely re-evaluate everything that happened in the first act, three times over.
“For us it’s a bit older because normally we do plays that are under five years old,” director Jenny Nelson said of Barbecue. But as she and Dexter Singleton, CCT’s artistic director, talked about what kind of play they wanted to reopen the theater with after the pandemic, “we were both interested in doing a comedy.… The world is such shifting sand. Things are so hard all the time, and even though we still want to do social issues and social justice — this play is still talking about a lot, for sure — we wanted to laugh. We wanted our audiences to feel joy, celebration. This is the comeback.”
Finding a play that fit the bill was “kind of a tall order,” especially in prioritizing the comedy, Nelson said. “It was a great challenge. And then I read this play.” Even on the page, Barbecue “had all of the elements we were looking for.” Not only because it was extremely fun and extremely funny, but also because “by the third scene, you’re a little disoriented. You don’t quite know what’s happening. Then it disorients again, and disorients again, but all through the line of comedy.”
It is, in many ways, a play that thrives on absurdity. “But life is so absurd right now,” Nelson said. “Every day feels like we’re in an absurdist play. So that felt like that was the big connection. We can all understand this. And have fun! And enjoy ourselves. And think.”
And while Barbecue in the end, takes on several issues at once — bringing the comedy and the drama to a satisfying end — “there’s no answer in this play. There’s no right or wrong,” Nelson said. “It’s so rare in life that we can sit and have a communal experience with people, and feel that … and then walk out asking questions about ourselves and about the play.”
Barbecue’s comedy deftly explores the way race, class, and culture tangle together, and ends up asking some deeper, pointed questions. “When you are living in poverty, or when you are entrenched in systemic racism, as Black folks are, what are you willing to do to ascend? What would you give up?” Nelson said.
More specifically, Barbecue’s comedy asks questions that feel up to the minute in their timeliness. Who gets to tell whose stories, and under what circumstances? When money is involved, where are the lines between cooperation and coercion, between earnings and exploitation? Who is playing whom? And who is playing themselves?
“This is a different approach for us, to talk about appropriation, but to talk about it through this absurdist, comedic lens,” Nelson said. She’s finding that approach particularly rich. As she’s gone over the play dozens of times in readings and rehearsals, “there are still things I’m finding,” she said, “about myself and about the play. I think we’re still mining for things.”
The cast — CCT’s largest in a production to date, involving an even split of Black and White actors — has been integral to that discovery process. “For a lot of the process, we were separated, and it was an interesting journey — that I think the playwright is intentionally interested in,” Nelson said. What happens if Black and White casts, playing the same set of characters, are first working apart from one another? And then what happens when you bring them together at the end? “I think it’s specifically written into the experience of the play, and it’s been fascinating to watch. It’s unique to any play I’ve ever done,” Nelson said.
Rehearsing each group apart from one another felt like “segregation,” she said, almost going against the mission of the theater. “We’re all about inclusion, and yet here we are,” she said of working on those separate scenes. Nelson wanted to give all the actors the chance to make their characters their own, rather than mimicking their counterparts — a drama that then happens explicitly onstage in the second, astonishing act of the play itself. “It was a trip,” Nelson said. Especially when, she said, the actors playing one another’s doubles “started doing the same things, even though they were in two different rehearsals,” Nelson said. “That happened a lot.” Again, Nelson credited the strength of O’Hara’s writing for making this happen. “It’s in there,” on the page, Nelson said. In time, she began passing notes from one group to the other as well, in creating continuity — though not too much.
The conversation about race and art, and who gets to tell whose stories, has changed dramatically in U.S. culture even since 2015, when Barbecue was first staged. Yet the way the play frames the questions still feels out in front of the current national conversation about it. It reminds us of the real complexity underneath those seemingly simple questions. It cautions us to be suspicious of any easy answers, and suggests that the way forward lies not in making a judgment call, but by trying to do the work, and seeing what happens — even if the next phase only means more questions.
That those problems Barbecue calls attention to persist makes sense “because all of these things still live in our culture,” Nelson said. And “I’m so glad we have an audience and a community that wants this. They want to have these conversations. We’re so lucky.”
“It’s such a gift to do this kind of theater,” she added, “because there is potential to change someone’s mind in this room. There’s potential to at least open a door and have someone think something they’ve never thought before, or to have empathy in a way that they didn’t, and that’s really exciting.” With humility, she said, “we’ve seen people in this room have a moment of clarity that they hadn’t known before they walked in. That’s what art can do. That’s why we keep doing it. And we’re not done.”
Barbecue runs at Collective Consciousness Theatre in Erector Square from March 23 to April 8. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.
