San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
False assumption leads to new point of view
“Every African American is an intellectual or a philosopher about race, because it’s something that you have to think about and negotiate all the time,” he said. He believes the fact he can pass as white adds another layer of awareness. “When you’re on a racial edge, you see things and you understand things that people don’t. It allows you to see power structures and changing mores.”
Still, he said, “the burden of having to think about race, and the burden of having to live with race, is a lot. The plus side is that you’re forced to think, but there’s a lot of downside.” When I shared with him that my own perception of his identity had shifted, he recalled answering questions about his race from his students at California College of the Arts. “When those people would know (my race), you could sense the narrative changing for them a bit,” he said. Now that he’s 58, he added, “I look at the world, and I find it to be entirely too sensitive.” Earlier, he’d told me, “I think it’s horrible to have to worry about narratives.”
Point taken. But finding myself energized by the question of whence derives a critic’s authority, I turned to Atlanta theater critic Kelundra Smith, whose acumen, wisdom and kindness make her my North Star in our profession.
“Revisiting (Wilkins’) work could be helpful, because you may view it differently knowing that his proximity to the work, given his lived experience and his ancestry, may be closer than yours,” she told me. “So he may have insight and be speaking from firsthand experience in a way that you assumed he wasn’t in the past.”
“At the same time,” she went on, “it’s important to note that regardless of whether he’s Black, white, yellow, red, indifferent — no one person speaks for an entire community.”
She used herself as an example. “Just because I’m a Black female critic from the South doesn’t mean that something I write about a production is more or less correct than what a white critic from the North would write about a piece of work by a Black artist. It’s just that I may have lived experience that might allow me to sympathize or empathize with characters or understand nuance or subtext in a way that gives me insight or knowledge. But it does
“When you’re on a racial edge, you see things and you understand things that people don’t. It allows you to see power structures and changing mores.”
John Wilkins, playwright and critic
not mean that you have to agree, if it’s something that’s subjective.”
She suggested the most important question was something else entirely: How might anyone assessing or reassessing Wilkins aspire not to judge but to be compassionate and curious?
That reminded me of a point Wilkins had made, about how making theater and critiquing it ultimately have a great deal in common.
“Criticism, theater, creating things, they all seem to me to be the same problem: to describe the world as honestly as you can,” he said. “One of the things that killed me and sapped my energy as a critic is when I would see something really great, I felt a moral and ethical responsibility of getting it right, and the tension of that. And when I saw something I really didn’t like or that rubbed me the wrong way, I felt an ethical and moral responsibility to really explain that.”
But that calling can be invigorating, too, because a critic can keep growing forever. Even the most onthemoney review can’t capture a show fully; today’s meticulous review can help you only incrementally with tomorrow’s. Those increments matter, though. Over time, you feel them pushing you, honing you, bringing you ever closer to the critic you aspire to be.