Small Houston stages push cultural boundaries with ‘Two Mile Hollow,’ ‘WET’
Plays showcase new generation of presenting radical perspectives from people of color
Have you ever seen someone pretend to be white? Me neither. That is, not until I saw “Two Mile Hollow,” the boisterous comedy by Leah Nanako Winkler that just finished its run at MATCH on Saturday.
It’s quite an act to pull off, especially at a time when the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, and his attorney general, Mark Herring, are in the cultural crosshairs and may be forced out of office for admitting they engaged in blackface when they were young men.
Here, the actors wear blond wigs and say things like “summer home” and “those Mexicans.” One character asks another, “Have you tried therapeutic horseback riding?” A matriarch complains about too much flavor in her soup. It’s all very funny.
That whiteness can be parodied seems like a novel notion. Whiteness is at best a set of appearances, behaviors and cultural norms that approximate “default” American identity, or at least it used to. When I was growing up, it meant not taking your shoes off when you came home. It meant cutting the head off the fish before you cook it. It meant fitting in. But we never called it being white. We called it being American.
Minorities, especially firstgeneration immigrants, often see normality as the most important trait of a citizen. Immigrants are often the most observant people in the room because noticing how others act — and emulating it — leads to survival. And in the dominant culture, up until very recently, Americanness equaled whiteness. Those who most want to assimilate don’t want to pretend to be white. They want to be white.
When you learn about theater in the U.S., you do something similar. You enter a foreign world, one with established rules and histories. You absorb and assimilate. You learn to read, perform and analyze a fixed set of authors, namely William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee.
Winkler knows her “dead white men canon.” You could say her play is post-assimilation — an act of commentary on her own artistic education. Her comedy, often broad, has moments of microscopic precision. You will love this play if you have read or seen “The Seagull,” by Anton Chekov, which helped birth modern drama but, Winkler points out, is ultimately about rich white people complaining about rich-white-people problems.
There’s Mary, who’s troubled by the lack of affection she received from her dominant mother and so spends her days gazing into the ocean and pretending to be a bird. “Something unique specifically to me is that I love storms,” she says, reflecting the entitled, self-absorbed, self-pitying nature of so many characters in family dramas. Mary has a rich and famous movie star for a half-brother, Christopher, who brings home a secretary, Charlotte, the only person of color in the play. Charlotte, an aspiring writer, is a stand-in less for the audience than Winkler herself.
By having actors of color play the white family, whiteness becomes noticeable in a way it might not be in typical masterpiece theater. It becomes an act, something contrived and unnatural and silly. We laugh at the characters because they reflect insularity.
This is not, to be sure, an act of making fun of white people. Not real ones. “Two Mile Hollow” is a takedown of history and genre. Yellowface and blackface is hurtful because they rob people of color narrative agency. It’s the artistic equivalent of a playground bully making fun of a kid for being different.
But the reverse act, as practiced in “Two Mile Hollow” — and in plays such as Brandon Jacob-Jenkins’ “An Octoroon” — serves more as cultural criticism than a mean-spirited clown act. The punchline is that the actors aren’t pretending to be white people. They’re pretending to be white characters. “Two Mile Hollow” critiques the fact that theater is ossified by a set of white norms that’s not nearly as universal as mainstream culture has assumed it to be. The blond wigs help.
If you want to see a play that actually makes fun of rich, white people, see “The Carpenter” instead. Rob Askins’ play, at the Alley Theatre, exposes Dallas and its residents for their hypocrisies. There is room for shock here because Askins seems to have spent a lot of time with those like his characters — trust-fund kids from Highland Park, tech-entrepreneur bros, mothers who show their love by lying and cutting you down.
But the most shocking takedown of white America featured in Houston’s theater scene this season wasn’t the artistic wink of “Two Mile Hollow” nor the anthropological middle finger of “The Carpenter.” It’s a visceral yet tenderhearted, relatable yet epic one-man show called “WET: A DACAmented Journey” which had only a one-night engagement. Winkler, in writing a family drama, and Askins, in writing a twin-brother comedy, parodied their chosen genres by taking on their forms. Alex Alpharaoh exposes the brutality of American immigration policy by breaking most of the rules of theater.
“WET” is an autobiographical work that follows Alpharaoh’s journey as an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant attempting to leave the U.S. temporarily to visit his dying grandfather. It’s a brutally political work, featuring scenes of devastated immigrants watching in horror as Donald Trump wins the presidency, takes measures to repeal DACA (a policy that gives undocumented children two-year work visas, allowing them temporarily to legally stay in the U.S.) and enacts a “Muslim travel ban.”
Typically in theater, such headlines form a political backdrop or an implied, wink-nudge criticism of Trump without actually mentioning the man’s name. But “WET” is in-your-face. It doesn’t allow intellectual escapism. When Alpharaoh portrays scenes of his mother risking his and her life to cross the border, or as he shudders under the gaze of a border officer treating him like a slab of meat, the audience can’t help but be carried along — pre-existing political opinions aside.
“WET,” a centerpiece show in “Sin Muros: A Latinx Festival” at Stages Repertory Theatre last weekend, signals a potential trend in Houston theater. Younger theater companies, such as Rogue Productions, and established ones, such as Stages, seem to want the same thing Winkler does — to add color to our theatrical history.
Both “Sin Muros” and Rogue Productions are in their second year. The Alley All New Festival, which helped develop and premiere “The Carpenter,” is another relative Houston newcomer with a non-normative bent.
The feminist theater company Mildred’s Umbrella recently hosted a mini-festival dealing with consent and abuse in the era of #MeToo. Catastrophic Theatre will soon produce “Bootycandy,” a comedy about black queerness by Robert O’Hara, who last year directed a partially gender-swapped “The Wiz” at Theatre Under the Stars.
Counter-narratives to the story of dead white men seem to be popping out from the Houston scene like dandelions. But whiteness isn’t being left in the dust — far from it. It’s simply being acknowledged, then prodded, interrogated and discussed.
There’s a David Foster Wallace joke in which an older fish greets two younger fish and says, “Mornin’. How’s the water?” And one younger fish says to the other, “What the hell is water?”
We’re finally starting to see the water.