2 plays probe thorny questions about race
‘Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies’ and ‘How to Be a White Man’ approach racial issues with edgy humor
Racial dynamics in this country are a thorny thing to navigate, which is probably why a lot of people spend so much time in denial that they’re a factor in daytoday life. Fortunately, two new plays in San Francisco are here to help, conveniently titled “Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies” and “How to Be a White Man.”
There’s a whole lot going on in “Hooded,” the devilishly funny and challenging play by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm now making its West Coast premiere at Custom Made Theatre Compay after its world premiere a year ago in Washington, D.C. Some locals were treated to an early glimpse of it in a staged reading on the same stage back in 2015 as part of Playwrights Foundation’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival.
Two African-American teenagers meet in the holding cell of a police station. Tru is from central Baltimore, while Marquis lives in an affluent suburb with his white adoptive parents and friends with names like Hunter and Fielder. In fact, he was arrested while “Trayvoning,” doing a gruesome, reallife photo meme lying face-down on the ground in a hoodie holding Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea. Tru decides Marquis desperately needs a crash course in being black in America. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in a play that invites viewers to continually question their own reactions, with a signaling light that instructs them to “laugh” at often deeply uncomfortable moments.
“The title does a lot of the work for us around articulating exactly what you’re going to see when you go in,” says director Lisa Marie Rollins, who was also the dramaturg for the play at the 2015 Playwrights Festival. She’s gone on to work with Chisholm on three of his other plays, including directing his new “Black Lady Authority” at Sundance Theatre Lab this summer.
“He’s really pointing to the fact that violence is just inherent to the way people think about black bodies in the United States,” she says. “While the piece is wildly funny, it’s still doing all of this work underneath that won’t let us escape from the fact that this is absolutely part of what it means to be black, to have to contend with the violence that exists around blackness.”
Rollins also does a lot of work focusing on trans-racial adoption, having founded an organization called Adopted and Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora. That’s a theme she finds resonant in Chisholm’s play.
“I do think that there’s a particular kind of identity development experience that adoptees have around blackness,” Rollins says. “It’s similar to what anyone who’s born to a black family has in terms of discovering who you are inside the African diaspora, but I think adoptees, who many times grew up without people of color in their lives, have to have a different way to figure out what that journey looks like if they don’t have any models in front of them. This is a really fun and comedic and hard version of what that experience is like.”
As for “How to Be a White Man,” Faultline Theater premiered Luna Malbroux’s comedy at PianoFight last year, but that was an almost entirely different play than the version the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company is unveiling at the African American Art & Culture Complex. The previous iteration featured many characters and multiple storylines, whereas this is a two-character piece about a black woman who decides that in order to land her dream job, she needs to get some of that white male privilege she’s seen in action so often.
“I saw the first version, and she asked me what I thought of
it,” says the director and theater company’s artistic director Rodney Earl Jackson Jr., who has shared an office with Malbroux at the complex for a few years but is collaborating with her for the first time. “I said it was a really beautiful piece that told lots and lots of stories, and none of them was really fleshed out that much. With a title so specific, do you want to flesh out maybe one of those topics? And she said yeah, let’s hone in on the relationship between
these two institutional opposites, the black woman and the white man.”
The seed was planted some years back after Malbroux, a comedian and anti-bias educator, developed a satirical app called EquiTable, designed to split meal bills based on the wage gap between ethnicities and genders, and experienced pushback from people somehow still arguing that white privilege was a myth.
“I guess because I live in the
world of doing anti-bias training, I thought it was understood that privilege is real, and there’s varying degrees of it, and there’s all kinds of privilege,” Malbroux says. “The other inspiration was just being a black woman in comedy and seeing how white men continuously get placed in opportunities for advancement, whereas in the black community, we have this phrase, ‘ You have to be twice as good.’ ”
Jackson says the play explores “very taboo situations that in a normal day we see and we face, but we don’t always talk about openly. This feels like one of those topics that people have been taught to step away from. And we believe that theater is one of the best vessels in which we can open ourselves to these complicated conversations.”