The Face of America

The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis has just published a short anthology of plays for young people. Each of the plays has been recently produced by CTC, and all share certain qualities that paint an interesting picture of the issues that today’s American youth face.

All four of the plays deal with the sometimes charged relationships between ethnic groups, and with parental absence. Larissa Fasthorse’s Average Family is composite of historic Native/Euro-American relations phrased in a way to which today’s non-indigenous youth can hopefully relate. Two families, an assimilated Indian one (with minimal family cohesion) and a redneck one (who are their own little militia), are pitted against each other on a reality show.  A ten-year-old Russian-American girl searches her multi-cultural apartment building for a pen in Melissa James Gibson’s Brooklyn Bridge, all while negotiating her emotionally complicated relationship to her mother who is always at work. In Lynn Alvarez’s Esperanza Rising, a twelve-year-old Mexican girl leaves her mother to work in California in the 1930s, where she takes a passive role in the fledgling labor movement and experiences first-hand anti-Latino bigotry. And an African-American mother and daughter take in a Somali refugee in Kia Corthron’s Snapshot Silhouette. All of these plays are written by adults, so their representativeness of the concerns of today’s youth is questionable, but if they are good representations, then they bring up two compelling issues. They would indicate that today’s youth are actively negotiating an increasingly multi-cultural world (which makes sense), and that they are troubled by a notable absence of parents caused by a priority of work over family, or by broken families period.

What do I make of these plays? I find Brooklyn Bridge to be the most compelling. Gibson’s lyricism and poignant humor tell the story of multi-culturalism and parental absence in America with a force that none of the others seem to be able to muster. Average Family is moving on the page, but I wonder how it plays. The concept seems contrived and execution heavy-handed, but perhaps that’s an effective way to tell this story to non-indigenous youth. Even if it works, the happy ending tells a false story. As much as we are getting back now in our Native Renaissance, we Indians haven’t had any clear and decisive victories. To have the redneck Monroes win the reality show would not only be accurate, but it would be troubling. And kids need to know that the good guys don’t always win, and that there’s nothing fair about warfare in general and certainly nothing fair about Indian/Euro-American wars in particular. Esperanza Rising is a competent and theatrical play, but one that I find non-remarkable. It seems that Alvarez has sprawling ambitions with this story, and there’s so much that it could be: it could be a melodrama, a portrait of a historical moment, a love story between Miguel and Esperanza, a coming of age story, a celebration of a mother’s love, or a political portrait of American oppression of Latino immigrants. It starts to be all of these things, but finishes the job with none of them. Snapshot Silhouette is well-written and exciting, but the scenic details that Corthron writes makes it seem like it almost wants to be a movie instead of a play. More importantly, I don’t buy the Somali protagonist Najma’s eloquence in English. I buy that she is in intelligent girl, and eloquent in languages she speaks, but she is the only student in the ESL class who doesn’t seem to need to be there. If that’s intentional on Corthron’s part, then she needs to further with it and actually make the point. If not, she needs to tone back Najma’s mastery of English. And yet, so much of the play rides on Najma’s lines, to do so would slow the story down. Either way it’s a loss.

Is The Face of America an interesting anthology that asks significant questions about today’s youth? Certainly. Is it rife with plays that I would want to see, or perhaps produce? No. Brooklyn Bridge is a stand-alone tour de force sandwiched between three perhaps unfinished plays.