Shades of black in a racist world
“Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies” opens with two black high school students sharing a jail cell. One of them, Tru, has been there more than a few times before. For the other, Marquis, this is a first. Tru talks in black slang, while Marquis speaks in prep-school sentences.
“You talk like a white person, yo,” Tru says.
Not long after, Marquis’ adoptive mom (a white woman) shows up and immediately gets him out. Then she tries to do the same for Tru. When the officer protests, she shoots back: “His mother is clearly doing the best that she can. She’s a single woman, uneducated, living in poverty, working two jobs at minimum wage to make ends meet because she doesn’t have a college education.” (Of course, she’s never met Tru, let alone his mother.)
In a couple of quick exchanges, Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm quickly introduces his audience to some of the central themes in his play “Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies,”
which has its West Coast premiere at Custom Made Theatre on Thursday, March 8. Chisholm takes a darkly comedic and deeply astute look at the many ways of being black in America, and how, no matter one’s proximity to whiteness, racism is always present, as Tru tries to teach Marquis about how to be black.
In a phone call from London, Chisholm says the idea to write the play came after he had just finished reading “Spring Awakening.” Chisholm had wanted to translate the sexual awakening of that work to one of a more racial nature.
“My awakening came really late,” he says. Sorting out and processing his blackness meant realizing that his black identity — and black identity in general — wasn’t one note. “I think I was both of them,” he says of Tru and Marquis.
As if to underscore the point, Jesse Vaughn (who plays Marquis) and Tre’vonne Bell (who plays Tru), tried out for both parts. Bell calls the characters “two sides of the same coin,” and both said they felt a connection to Tru and Marquis. Vaughn said the role of Marquis initially scared him, but that eventually, “I found so much truth in it. Truth about my family and about my friends.”
While the play works to explore black identity, it also takes steps toward addressing racism — both the smaller, sometimes harder to catch, comments from “wellmeaning” white people, and the larger systemic racism that finds black men in jail cells at a much higher rate than their white counterparts.
Throughout the play, a “Laugh” sign flashes to let the audience know when something is funny, pushing them to be complicit in some of the more awkward, racially tinged material.
“The audience is constantly having to look at themselves, struggle with why they think something is funny,” says director Lisa Marie Rollins, who also helped with dramaturgy on the play as Chisholm was writing.
The discomfort seems necessary, Rollins says, especially at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has seemed to slip some from public view, as other national conversations, such as #MeToo, come into greater focus.
“My hope is that the play is a reminder of the way that black men and women are still seen in the United States, even with all of the amazing, joyful things that are happening right now in the media,” Rollins says. “These things are still happening.”
“I found so much truth in it. Truth about my family and about my friends.” Jesse Vaughn, on the initially scary role of Marquis