Hurt Village

One of my major frustrations with the dominate culture is the way it lumps all ethnic minorities into one simple category. While the Greeks had their barbarians, and the Jews their Gentiles, white America has its People of Color.

That said, Katori Hall’s depiction of the social disintegration in the Hurt Village district of Memphis in her play of the same name was uncomfortably familiar to me. The drug use, broken families, dislocation, and men from poor communities used as military cannon fodder is as much a part of Indian country as it is the indigent black community in Hall’s story.

Eerily, the similarities don’t stop there. In the first act, Hall tells the story with her tongue in her cheek. I’m familiar with this kind of humor being used as a coping mechanism in Indian country, so I was surprisingly at home with its use in Hurt Village.

But the humor went away after the first act, and all I was left with were images of absentee fathers and people screwing their lives up with drugs. I see too much of that in real life, and it breaks my heart every time. I don’t need to see it when I go to the theater. But I wasn’t the only person in the audience. Maybe others there did need to see that kind of hopelessness and destruction? But I’m not so sure. I was the only Indian I was aware of there, and there were a few African Americans and Asians, but the audience was primarily affluent whites.

So my question is what is Hall trying to accomplish parading stories about poor blacks who have to sell crack to survive in Memphis in front of well-to-do white New Yorkers? The answer that seems most likely to me is that this is a therapy play – a piece to help the playwright work through some hurt that is setting on her. Once a playwright gets that out of her or his system, she or he can continue to tell all the other stories that need to be told. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, the only difference is that the other therapy plays I’m aware of have an element of healing, something Hurt Village lacks. To further argue against my theory, this is not Hall’s first play. It could be that it takes her more than one play to work through her hurt, but based on my previous experience with this sort of theater, I’m left questioning her commitment to her community. Is Hurt Village really a constructive piece of art, that helps a traumatized community and/or person heal, or is it simply a playwright capitalizing on that trauma by selling it to the highest bidder?

That’s my question, but you can see for yourself and make up your own mind. Hurt Village plays at the Signature Theatre on 42^nd Street until March 18^th. Tickets are $25 at http://www.signaturetheatre.org/tickets/production.aspx?pid=1940.

Stopped Bridge of Dreams

Walking into La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre for John Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams, one is struck by the compelling stage design. The seats are arranged across from each other on either side of the room with projection screens hanging and sitting in the space between them. A video swirls pinkish red above on two of the screens – is it blood or is it fire? The play even begins floating above the audience’s heads. The action drops to the ground with Black-Eyed Susan and Preston Martin playing Mrs. X and Hiroshi – the Madame of the flying brothel and one of her whores - respectively. Video and performance and a multiplicity of stories swirl between the audience until pouring into the core story of a flying whore-house, an embodiment of disincorporation and groundlessness. Even sex, normally so earthy, is uprooted in the frank and business-like manner with which the characters treat it. All emotion, in fact, was pulled from its normal human-centricity, and an atmosphere of flight supplanted it. Instead of emanating from the humans, it incorporated from the composition – the juxtaposition of dialogue and narration, human flesh on the floor and their video images projected from multiple angles above. The groundless atmosphere and lack of sentiment are a response, according to Donald Keene’s program note, to the work of Japanese novelist Saikaku Ihara, “whose books are called ukiyo-zoshi or tales of the floating world.” The broader genre of Saikaku’s ukiyo-zoshi or Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams – fiction – is one uprooted from reality. What Jesurun does is radicalize that core element of fiction, and he does it in a smooth and seamlessly constructed way. It closes this February 5^th, but if he brings it back in your area, I highly recommend seeing it, especially if you’re interested in seeing the art of fiction exploded spatially before you.