Racism leaves blurry marks in ‘Inked Baby’
It’s so easy for Gloria (Christell Lewis) and her family to blame themselves.
Why can’t they just talk to each other? Did they think it would be frictionless, no big deal, to ask Gloria’s sister to have sex with Gloria’s husband, so that the married couple could finally have a baby? And if Gloria had just been fertile, if her body had only been “built to handle things,” as her husband, Greer (David Everett Moore), puts it during an argument, couldn’t they have been spared this whole surrogacy mess? Why did Gloria and Greer even want to have a child if they can’t even give each other the love they need? And for the baby that Lena (Leigh RondonDavis) is carrying, what kind of home will it enter?
That selfrecrimination is exactly what the system wants in “Inked Baby,” now in a West Coast premiere by Crowded Fire. You can almost hear someone saying, “Yes, keep beating up on yourselves,” as if there were evil scientists toying with the characters from behind a twoway mirror. “Pay no attention to the insidious macrocosmic forces shaping your lives and shoving you down.”
The bighearted and farsighted aim of Christina Anderson’s play, which opened Monday, Sept. 16, at the Potrero Stage, is to bring those forces, those scientists and the power structure they represent into the light. It seeks to expose racial prejudice as tangible, how it poisons the soil we walk on, the air we breathe, the beds we sleep and make love in, the relationships we depend on; how it infects and scars the black body, how it tags, leaves marks; and how it inflicts all this woe so effectively by disguising itself as shame.
But “Inked Baby,” which premiered in 2009 at Playwrights Horizons, in New York, still feels unfinished, as if it hasn’t fully landed on the rules of its universe and then reckoned with the ramifications of those rules. At first, you could mistake the show for a love triangle grounded in medicinecabinet realism — the narration of the instructions on Lena’s heartburn medication, what health insurance does and doesn’t cover for couples struggling to conceive. Toward the end, all of a sudden Gloria says her house — the home where Gloria and Lena grew up — is important, an 11 o’clock stab at that proud American theater tradition of claims on the family homestead standing in for claims on identity and citizenship.
In between, a quasisurreal, quasiscifi plot tentacle, in the form of an unnamed medical assistant ( Jennifer McNeal), barges in and then slinks back out as if no one noticed it was there or that it left. She seizes the characters for testing one by one, sanctioned by all their workplaces, but never saying by what authority or for what purpose. As she wrenches their arms into position to draw blood and then label with tags, as if they were corpses in body bags, they all gasp and freeze, as if she had a spider’s power to stun them into helplessness. Fittingly, McNeal even strides with the focus and calm of a bloodthirsty shark assured of its kill.
These scenes are ghastly, summoning the horror of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the gynecological experiments J. Marion Sims performed without anesthetics on slaves. Bay Area audiences might well see connections to the closetohome environmental injustice of the botched cleanup of the Hunters Point shipyards.
Much later, some of the characters say they couldn’t mention these violations, even with their families, because they felt shame. But even when they finally talk about that shame, they soon move on to other subjects. When symptoms of sickness start manifesting, even in grotesque or poetic forms, with sludgy, crumbly substances spilling out of bodies, no one reacts to the degree the situation would seem to demand, aside from some silent writhing during scene changes. And if an older, now dead generation also suffered a strange sickness, it’s not clear why a younger generation would only now start showing symptoms, only now start making the connection to some possible contaminant — and then abandon that connection as if they ran out of steam.
This is not to argue that “Inked Baby” must hew to realism; it’s refreshing to see theater that breaks out of those shackles. But declining one set of rules doesn’t obviate the need for some other. When characters respond differently than we might, we have to be able to say, “Of course. Given this universe, it could be no other way.” But to be able to feel that way, we must first be given enough clues about what that universe is.