Tag: #no-safety-net

REVIEW: Is This a Room

Angela Lin Leave a comment

It starts with a foggy, black stage and a spotlight on a woman. That woman is Reality Winner. You may not recognize her name, but you might’ve heard her story. She leaked a document about the 2016 election to The Intercept and was arrested and sentenced to 63 months. However, as she sits in prison, Half Straddle, a New York Based-company, has kept her story alive, and they brought it to Ann Arbor in their UMS debut. 

The premise of the concept itself made the theatrical piece intriguing. With nothing to go off of but an audio transcript and the reported aftermath, I felt like there wasn’t much to the story. 

But boy was I wrong.

The tone, the body language, and the pauses—all of which were purely imagined for the stage—dictated the play more than the verbatim words. Every cough was captured, As the actors walked around the small stage, it shifted from the driveway to the backyard to room to room. And you knew that with every step they took, they were getting closer to the gripping truth. However, due to the bare staging and the nature of the script, some parts of the play were confusing as scenes shifted or we heard simply one-sided conversations. Additionally, the sudden bursts of noise and flashes of lights were unexpected, and while some of them indicated parts of the transcript that were redacted, others were unexplained, leaving the audience wondering what was being left unsaid and why things were staged a sudden way. The disorienting sounds of a synth further enhanced the thrill.

The four actors of Half Saddle conveyed the tense situation and brought the transcript to life in their imagined enactment. Emily Davis captured the nervous chuckles and humor of Reality, trying to lighten up the conversation as Pete Simpson and TL Thompson played the two special agents who acted friendly through small talk but persisted in getting the truth. Becca Blackwell played an unknown male whose role was pretty nebulous, but they seemed to alleviate the tension with their body humor. Their combined presence on the stage—making it a total of three versus Reality—seemed to corner her intimidatingly. When you realize there were eleven agents interrogating Reality in reality, the nerves conveyed in the transcript seem completely reasonable. 

“Is This a Room” is a surreal interpretation of the events that went down on June 3, 2017. And it’s a reminder that the ramifications of that day remain today.

REVIEW: Underground Railroad Game

tintinj Leave a comment

I’m glad I got a warning from my professor before I actually watched the play. “Explicit scenes,” he wrote in a mild-mannered email, “some nudity.”

Some, indeed. The image of Teacher Caroline, in skirt and bra, using a school meter ruler to lift Teacher Stuart’s penis in a sexually charged after-school fantasy is still burnished in my scantily prepared mind.

But don’t get me wrong. While sex plays a big part of the play, it’s not a publicity tool there to generate WTF moments. It’s a crucial sub-theme explored within the context of the modern racism the creators are trying to break down and show audiences.

Stuart and Caroline, leaders of Confederate and Union “soldiers”

Their agents? Middle school teachers Stuart, a “progressive” white teacher and his black colleague/romantic partner Caroline, who are on a quest to teach impatient middle schoolers (i.e the audience) about the silver lining of slavery: the Underground Railroad. Interestingly, while this classroom narrative initiates the play, it’s not the main feature nor the closer. Instead it served more as strategically-placed intermissions that relaxed some of the visual, emotional, and mental overload delivered by the three other interweaving narratives (so that our brains don’t just explode in one sitting).

The first narrative is one where we see Stuart and Caroline outside of the classroom on the street, talking on the way to class. Their conversations turn coquettish at times but uncomfortable in most. Stuart often stumbles around making earnest comments that often sound racist (in discussing the possibility of them becoming a couple, he blurts out that he needs to check with “her people”). Caroline takes them without offense and responds with her own racist jokes (at one point she does a Mean Girl imitation). These scenes point at the obviousness of race in today’s often-termed “post-racial” society.

Slave and Abolitionist

The second narrative is a role play that involves the characters Stuart and Caroline act out for their “students” in class: an abolitionist and the slave he tries to protect. It’s a simplified children’s story that exaggerates the “good parts” of slavery, satirically portrayed fairytale style, with a hero and a damsel in distress. Fittingly, the play cuts this narrative before it comes to a conclusion almost all the time, as if it denies its overstated significance in the conversation about racism.

The third narrative is set in the bedroom (and the couple’s shared fantasyland). It’s here that the play explores a lot of its discussion-worthy themes in racism. One of the most memorable scenes in the play happened in this setting. What was initially a “Meet a Slave” lecture (Stuart interviewing Annabelle/Caroline the slave for the students) turns increasingly sexual FAST after Annabelle/Caroline starts complimenting Stuart’s body. But this is no ordinary sex scene.

A/C (in an elevated curtain-like dress): “What do you like about me, Teacher Stuart?”

S: “Your voice.”

A/C: “What do you like about it?”

S: “It feels like it-”

A/C:”Comes from the Earth? Rolls…over my body?” (starts unbuttoning her blouse while motioning for Stuart to come over. She starts to hum a spiritual, haunting tune.)

With Caroline’s torso fully naked, Stuart comes over, suckles her breast, then crawls under her ballooned dress. Yep, its definitely R-rated.

But it takes an interesting look at race relations. A slave, bound and reduced to her manual labor, is at the same time glorified (she is much bigger than Stuart on top of invisible stand), and fetishized for her association to the Earth. She becomes a form of enslaved Mother Earth that is treated as an object but at the same time, enshrouded by a primeval form of energy that attracts and fascinates white men.

These interesting investigations on race were sprinkled throughout the play. During my class discussion after the play, we touched on things like Stuart’s “progressive racism” and Caroline’s “revenge” fantasy that explore racial relations from two sides of the divide. Overall, Underground Railroad Game is definitely one of those plays that you will remember for a very long time. Now, I’m gonna get back to figuring out how they did it all.