Yale Cabaret
The Yale Cabaret’s most recent feature, The Untitled Project, proposed and directed by Ato Blankson-Wood and devised by the ensemble, is a meditation on being a black man in America. Using a battery of techniques, including straightforward address to the audience, a series of projections from historical and popular sources, interpretive dance, soliloquies, readings, skits, and even a send-up of blackface minstrelsy, the show might be likened to Hamlet’s strategy in trying to outfox the king: “by indirections find direction out.” The “indirections” are the many, many racist distortions of what it “means” to be black; the direction is finding a way to maintain purpose and dignity within a racist context.
The Untitled Project ran at the Yale Cabaret from Feb. 26 to Feb. 28.
From the start, The Untitled Project assumes there is no unified concept or context for what it’s like to live as a black person in America. We grasp at once that “black” entails a variety of races, places of origin, family histories, and identities, as the men who take part in the play — Blankson-Wood, Cornelius Davidson, Leland Fowler, Galen Kane, Taylor Barfield, Jiréh Breon Holder, and Phillip Howze — introduce themselves one by one as they arrive on stage.
Presenting themselves as who they are establishes at once that the play is grappling with reality, while at the same time suggesting that “who they are” is not so easy to define. The questions of who assigns the labels and of what living with a label means are sounded from the start. In a sense, everything that follows comments on those questions.
This becomes the basis for a comedy-drama. An encounter between Blankson-Wood, wearing a sign that says “bougie,” and Fowler, a graffiti artist with headphones wearing a sign that says “thug,” shows how a script is already written for such roles. Blankson-Wood can’t help sounding more “white” the louder and “blacker” Fowler becomes. When Kane, wearing a sign that says “pig,” intervenes as a cop, the roles become even more determined. Now Blankson-Wood must downplay Fowler’s disturbance to avoid becoming “an oppressor,” while Fowler must become more deviant, hinting at racial betrayal in the others. Meanwhile Kane tries to find out if any real threat exists.
Each actor breaks his role to address the audience, letting us know that the tag each wears is not imposed by white society per se. As Blankson-Wood says, with urgency, “we do it to ourselves.” Black culture metes and doles its roles. Eventually, Cornelius Davidson, wearing the sign “sweet,” turns up and an altercation with Fowler turns on another label — not “how black,” but “how much a man.”
In The Untitled Project, manhood — as a requirement to maintain sullen stoicism, or to lord it over women, or to insult gays on sight — becomes a quality forever needing to be “proven,” if only to shake off associations with slavery. One answer might be ultra-talented Blankson-Wood’s powerfully precise dance piece, as the actor’s sculptured form seems to embody the constant tensions of oppression and expression. Preceded by the high-stepping gambols of Fowler and Kane, wearing black hoods with white mouths, Blankson-Wood’s movements set the struggle of individual meaning within the debased language of cultural cartoons. The show’s “blackface” segment not only remind viewers of the long-enduring white mockery of black showmanship, but gives such dumbshow a malevolent edge. The figures capture both the white fear of the hooded black man and the white jeering at the blackfaced white man. Infantilized in popular images, feared on the streets, the manhood of the black man is never free of an uneasy relation to the manliness of the white man — and, more generalized, of The Man.
The Untitled Project sketches the range of black experience for a time when the President of the United States can claim common cause with a black youth killed on the street by a vigilante or a policeman. Blankson-Wood and the ensemble recognize that what W.E.B. DuBois once called “the talented tenth” have a duty to find a way to make the stories of privilege and poverty meaningful to each other, and to keep enlarging the conversation so that “images of race” become too diffuse and various to be oppressive or limiting.
At the show’s close, the main participants stood on stage with the words “I am” projected on each man. The phrase was both a statement — “I exist,” as an individual and as an example — and a question: “I am” … what?
Something still untitled.
The Yale Cabaret’s next show, Leonce and Lena, runs Mar. 5 – 7.