SUZAN-LORI PARKS' 'WHITE NOISE' - 40 DAYS A SLAVE

Zoë Winters and Daveed Diggs

BY HENRY EDWARDS - NEW YORK - April 10, 2019

In 2018, The New York Times declared Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander, “Top/Dog,” the best play of the last 25 years, and its prolific author “the most consistently inventive and venturesome American dramatist working today."

Parks is first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer in Drama (no biography of her lets you forget it).

She regularly applies rich language, symbols, metaphor and an ever-changing stylistic lens (symbolist fever dream; Brechtian fable; Homeric epic) to the troubled subject of racial and sexual identities, resulting in a body of work of striking originality.

Parks’ 19^th play, “White Noise,” recently made its debut at the Public Theater, and it just might be the writer’s first venture into the realistic genre – at least during its first half.  The realism takes on surrealist overtones as the three-hour-long play charges to its conclusion.

But it is not all that easy to apply the label of “surreal” to Parks’ acute dramatization of the impossibility of blacks and whites achieving a legitimate friendship And we happen to living in a time so surreal that the current administration chalked up more than 200 examples of racism in the first 19 months of its existence and appears to have an ideological commitment to enabling white supremacists.

Credit a new classification system renders for rendering it impossible for the public or even elected officials to know whether the FBI is dedicating resources to investigating the very real threat of white supremacist terror or if those resources are going toward the harassment of Black Lives Matter and civil rights workers.

“White Noise” is fascinating and disturbing, and it inspired a journalist to ask the author if she was “conscious of the fact much of the audience at your plays is white?”

Parks had the perfect answer: “Yes, but they’re ready to do the work. It might still freak them out, but they are excited by the engagement that I’m asking of them . . . My job, to quote James Baldwin [her former teacher], is to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

I was ready.

The play revolves around two interracial couples who are best friends, Leo (Daveed Diggs) and Dawn (Zoë Winters), and Ralph (Thomas Sadoski) and Misha (Sheria Irving), with the narrative threaded through the character of Leo.

Leo is a black visual artist; Dawn, an ambitious criminal defense lawyer; Ralph, a wealthy unpublished novelist and part-time college writing professor; and Misha the host a live-streamed, call-in web show accurately titled “Ask a Black.”

Leo previously dated Misha and Ralph dated Dawn.

 “And then we all broke up and … got reconfigured in different ways,” explains Leo.

The “reconfiguration” includes three years of Dawn and Misha sharing a secret sexual involvement and a continuation of Ralph’s incurable cheating habit.

The foursome exudes a cool and contemporary, thirty-something urban hipster vibe. From a distance, they seem to be inhabitants of a real-life version of a fantasy post-racial America free from racial preference, discrimination and prejudice where color does not matter.

Looking closer tells another story.

Parks provides each member of the quartet with a potent monologue. Leo’s soliloquy launches the play.

 He tells the audience he has suffered from insomnia since the age of five and “the shortage of sleep has made me, you could say, edgier, than most people.  And angry. And so, I’m the fractured and angry and edgy black visual artist.”

Ralph and he “love” each other, and Ralph has gifted Leo with a white-noise machine.  Leo used the device for a year and it helped. But the white noise clouded his brain and he could not paint.

For that reason, he jettisoned the apparatus. Yet the sound of white noise remains embedded in his brain, stressing and exhausting him.

When Leo can’t sleep, he walks. On the previous night, he walked to the white neighborhood he’d love to live in someday and was accosted by cops who smashed his face into the ground. Leo genuinely thought he was going to be shot just like he always sees happening to black men on the news.

Now he’s in really terrible shape.  He is an artist without a gallery which makes him feel like a failure. He has lost his creative inspiration. And his experience with the cops has unleashed his deepest fears about the racist world he inhabits.

Leo desperately wants to inoculate his mind against the steady accumulation of white noise from both the white noise machine and the pain and injustice a black man experiences in a racist white society.

In another part of town, buddy Ralph is facing his own crisis.

Normally, he operates the camera while Misha “acts black” on her web show.  But the normally jocular and supportive boyfriend is so upset and angry he interrupts the taping in order to vocalize his distress.

Ralph is a writer who has never published, never been loved by his father, raised poor and never has felt he was good enough.

Even though he has inherited “a robust chain of bowling alleys coast to coast” worth millions from his absentee father, he continues to feel powerless.

The one thing that was going to make him feel whole was a tenure-track promotion he was “promised” at his college day job.

But Ralph was passed over. Even worse, the position went to a candidate who writes sonnets, comes from Sri Lanka, has dark skin and identifies as black.

The “betrayal” haunts him. “A second-rate person has my job just because that second-rate person is black,” bellows the infuriated victim of reverse discrimination.

Even though Masha refuses to cut him any slack, he refuses to let up.

The four friends often go bowling after hours in their traditional hangout, an empty alley and one of the many owned by Ralph.

Clint Ramos’ extremely spare stage design has the wit to include two little dug-out channels that deliver bowling balls to the players,  Xavier Pierce’s flashing lights amplify the illusion of a bowling alley, and screens mounted around deliver the scores of the competitors.

Zoë Winters, Thomas Sadoski, Daveed Diggs and Sheria Irving

During a break, Leo proposes a “totally far-out idea that could solve everything.”

“I would like to be owned,” he tells Ralph. “Make me your property.”

In the old days, when a slave had a master and he was a good slave, he was protected by the master. Leo has a desperate need to feel safe, protected and respected, racism has exhausted him, and he has run out of options, leading him to the conclusion only his best friend’s wealth and skin color can protect him.

He is so serious he has brought along a contract. For 40 days he’ll be Ralph’s “Enslaved Person,” in exchange for the “protection” that a “Big Somebody” like Ralph can offer from “the man.”

In return, he will be paid $89,000 he will use to eliminate his credit card debt and college loans.

Leo adds that the experience will allow him to explore his heritage and his anger, and serve as a means of “showing the world how far we’ve not come.”

Initially, the women and Ralph are horrified by the idea – it is awful idea and doomed to backfire and fail - but it is hard to say no to Leo.

There also is the sense that something about the venture has an enigmatical appeal to both men. They are players and Leo has come up with a tempting brand new game.

The second half of “White Noise” dramatizes the real-life, real-time 40-day experiment.

Almost immediately (and surprisingly), Ralph becomes intoxicated with his power over Leo and the master-slave relationship allows him to act out the white resentment that turns out always to have been lurking in him.

One uncomfortable tableau follows another.

In one appalling sequence, Ralph brings Leo a slave collar and insists that he wear it. As Leo puts on the hideous and sadistic fetish device, I gasped out loud.

And I was not the only one.

The shock of the revolting image is still with me.

Ralph also cultivates a terrifying group of “new friends,” an upper-class white supremacist group that gets together to talk about how they “don’t want to be passed over or excluded or disenfranchised.”

 “We’re just a little sore. It’s kind of a big sore, actually. Festering,” explains Ralph.

Misha and Dawn are compelled to come to grips with the truth about their respective backgrounds.

In her monologue, Misha explains she is the daughter of two fiercely loving, academically high-pressure “very black” mothers and was raised by the lesbian professors in a mostly-white college town.  Her upbringing has left her with a perpetually exhausting black identity crisis, oscillating between the way she was raised and the elf-created street” character she plays on “Ask a Black.”

Dawn’s monologue deals with how she was raised to devote her life to social justice, and how she has compromised herself by successfully defending a young black man she knew was guilty because of her own white-savior complex.

As “White Noise” hurtles toward its conclusion, it comes down to two men, master and slave, alone in a bowling alley and seemingly destined to destroy each other.

But it’s a standoff. The affection between them? Over. Their seemingly happy history? Erased.

Racism and power relations have taken care of that.

But in a burst of irony, Leo starts drawing again. Misha’s show takes off. Dawn ends up with a better job. Ralph gets published in The New Yorker.

I have listened and I was left wondering whether there is a master-slave relationship buried in each of us and what exactly do we wrap ourselves in order to keep from hearing the lies that we live by?

“White Noise” is a provocative play.

Thomas Sadoski, Daveed Diggs, Zoë Winters, and Sheria Irving
 

‘MLIMA’S TALE’ IS ALL ABOUT GREED

Sahr Ngaujah with Jojo Gonzalez and Ito Aghayere in silhouette behind him (Photo: Joan Marcus)

HENRY EDWARDS  - New York - May 12, 2018

It’s been said Lynn Nottage isn’t on a mission to save the world, but as a sensitive and engaged citizen and human being, occasionally she believes one of the world’s myriad problems cries out for action—and, since she’s a playwright, that usually means writing a play. 

Two of those efforts, “Ruined” (2009) and “Sweat” (2017), received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Nottage is the first woman to win this award twice.

“Ruined,” a dramatization of the plight of women in the civil war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, conveyed the agonizing message that rape is a profoundly damaging weapon of war and must be stopped.

“Sweat,” the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era and a portrait of the America that had come undone, dramatized the disaffection and racism of white working-class voters in the rust belt of Pennsylvania.

“Mlima’s Tale,” Nottage’s new play at The Public’s Martinson Hall, chooses as its subject one of the largest, most shadowy criminal trafficking networks in the world, the $10 billion a-year ivory poaching trade.

That one elephant is killed every 15 minutes is all you need to know to appreciate Nottage’s concern.

If her play was documentary drama, one of those elephants undoubtedly would have been title character, Mlima ("mountain” in Swahili), a decades-old Kenyan bull elephant and "one of the last of the big tuskers.” Each tusk was 10 feet long and weighed 198 pounds.

Around 25 elephants currently exist that are genetically disposed to grow tusks so big they sometimes reach the ground.

Actor and director Sahr Ngaujah, who is of Sierra Leonean ancestry, portrays Mlima. Ngaujah is perhaps best known to New York audiences for playing another title role, that of the late Nigerian singer Fela Kuti in the musical “Fela!”

Bristling with intensity and remarkable athleticism, he delivers a majestic performance that effortlessly captures the physical, emotional and spiritual grandeur of the mighty animal. Ngaujah is such an arresting visual presence you can't take your eyes off him.

Mlima lives in the savannas of a Kenyan game preserve and supposedly under the protection of national laws. 

Our first sight of him finds him bathed in moonlight, an imposing silhouette against the bright night sky.

In his opening monologue—it will turn out to be Mlima’s last living words—the elephant utilizes rich, sensory language to tell us “how you listen can mean the difference between life and death. It’s the truth of the savanna, something we all learn at a very young age.”

That ability has proved incapable of sparing him.

Poachers have shot Mlima with a poison arrow (poachers inside parks often use arrows instead of rifles in order not to alert rangers) and his will to live has enabled him to run from them for 40 days.  But he is weaker and they are closing in.

Mlima’s anguished wail shakes the theatre during the agonizing death scene that precedes the poachers hacking off his tusks.

Nottage’s “Ruined” is an adaptation of Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” For “Mlima’s Tale,” the playwright chose the format of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s once controversial 1897 play, “La Ronde,” as her model.

“La Ronde” (film buffs may recall Max Ophüls’s stylish 1950 film version) presents sex as a daisy chain of ten erotic encounters, each a duet in which one character from each scene becomes a part of the next.

Utilizing the same prototype of overlapping lives, “Mlima’s Tale” traces the step by step journey of the fallen elephant’s mammoth tusks as they depart Kenya, travel through several countries while undergoing an increasingly profitable and slimy series of transactions before they reach their final destination in a Beijing penthouse.

Actors Kevin Mambo, Jojo Gonzalez and Ito Aghayere dexterously (and quickly) bring to life twelve participants in the revolving door of a market economy powered by greed and riddled with corruption, deceit and complicity.

The enormously skilled trio relies on restrained changes of body language and accents, a touch of exaggeration and Jennifer Moeller’s costumes to create a gallery of poachers, park warden, police chief, African government official, Chinese collector, Vietnamese smuggler, boat captain, master ivory carver and nouveau riche millionairess art buyer, among others.

In the act of doing business, each character undercuts the one before and lies to the next on the ladder up. Along the way, there are betrayals or pay offs or both.

One person is always in control and one person struggling to gain control. At some point each has the option of not participating but ultimately chooses to participate.

Several times, characters ask for assurances that the ivory was extracted legally, that no animals were really harmed, and that anyone who does harm animals will be punished.

No matter their individual concerns, each ultimately lacks sufficient integrity, allowing greed, moral weakness and self-preservation always to win the day.

Nottage creates these duets with restraint.  Unbridled capitalism and not its wheelers and dealers, each with an understandable (but often infuriating) motive, is the real villain here. Capitalism simply does not allow virtuous behavior or anything resembling it.

As with Brecht, we always know who the winner is going to be and around the midpoint, “Mlima’s Tale” turns wearisome and didactic.

The subject of poaching is nothing new, we share the playwright’s anger about it, and each day’s news about our federal government destroys the shock value of greed and corruption.

What does continue to fascinate is Nottage’s treatment of Mlima after the elephant’s death.

The Maasai believe that if you don’t give an elephant a proper burial, the elephant will haunt you forever. The conviction transforms “Mlima’s Tale” into a ghost story about a murder and the victim’s afterlife.

After the death of the animal, Ngaujah performs a stark, otherworldly dance-like ritual and covers his face and torso with streaks of white paint to represent Mlima’s transformation from regal elephant in life to commodity in death.

While Mlima's body has been deserted, his spirit remains with his tusks.

During every scene that follows, the spirit stands silently and imposingly in the background, observing and listening intently to the negotiations.  Ngaujah smears each of the participants with white paint at exactly the moment the transaction has been completed. The stains are well earned marks of Cain.

During a voyage from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa to Vietnam, the tusks are placed in the cargo hold of a ship. The sight of a partially clad and caged black man inevitably summons thoughts of the Middle Passage, the stage of the slave trade in which millions of Africans were abducted into slavery and shipped to the New World.

Again, self-interest and greed are the order of the day.

Jo Bonney (“An Ordinary Muslim,” “Red Letter Plays: Fucking A”, “Cost of Living”) is a director with an artistic flexibility that allows her to transform a multitude of styles into coherent and satisfying theatrical works.   In the case of “Mlima’s Tale,” her theatrical inventiveness and discipline have been applied to create a show that is speedy, spare and beautiful to look at.

Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalist set consists mostly of an empty box and utilizes a series of sliding panels that fly open and close to reveal multitudinous locations.  No two scenes occur in the same place and each scene is “titled” with an appropriate (sometimes silly) African proverb (“No one tests the depth of the river with both feet") projected on graceful floating screens.

Lap Chi Chu’s richly colored lights make an immense contribution to the spare but arresting stage pictures.

Musician and composer Justin Hicks, visible throughout the performance just outside the stage proper, makes an extraordinary contribution.

Hicks and the sound designer Darron L West miraculously craft a world where “thunder is not yet rain.” We hear animals breathing, insects whirring, and an elephant’s trumpeting roar that shakes the theatre.

In a final speech, Mlima tells the audience, “If you can hear me, don’t come to mourn me,” he tells us, warning the members of his tribe to protect themselves. “Run! Run! RUN!”

The poachers who killed Mlima were offered $500, but were paid half. Ultimately, the tusks fetched a staggering $1.1 million in China.

The agonizing last image of the play takes us a penthouse in China whose owners are delighted to show their newest status symbol, an exquisite ivory set. The lights come down on Ngaujah who has ended up a decorative carving.

 Nottage’s passion is so overwhelming it makes it easy to forgive the monotony that takes over the central portion of the play.

Sahr Ngaujah (Photo: Joan Marcus)