The lobby is a locker room. Individual cubbies await each audience member. GUIDE—later CAPTAIN, later MASTER, later SHERIFF—enters.
GUIDE
Please silence your cell phones and unwrap any candies, cough drops. Today, we’re going on an adventure. We’ll explore foreign countries, sail across rough waters, meet a few interesting characters, and, perhaps, experience the fullness of life. You have a role to play. In fact, we cannot begin until you are in character. In each cubby, there is a costume. One size. It stretches. Slip it on. Over your clothes. Ask a neighbor to zip you in. You have 5 minutes. (GUIDE exits.)
In each cubby, a neatly folded brown, leathery clump, “the costume,” sits on a shelf. Nearby, an audible gasp. Someone just realized that the clump is the skin of a black person minus the bones and innards. The body is intact, head to toes, fingernails, hair. A flesh costume. Most audience members are not fazed. This is theatre—and the skin probably isn’t really real (but it is!). They get dressed—putting on black skin, zipping each other up, delighting in their blackness—their saggy, misfitting blackness. A spectator tries on a faux dialect, “Jive turkey” or something along those lines. Another shushes. One of the two has brown skin under the costume. GUIDE, now CAPTAIN, enters with a whip.
CAPTAIN
In line! In line! Faster Negroes! Yes, you, faster!
(CAPTAIN cracks the whip. Maybe someone gets hit, maybe the skin costume rips, maybe blood appears)
Shit just got real. And audience members are loving it: the immersion into blackness and the world of the play. A line forms. CAPTAIN spews increasingly offensive racist epithets before settling on the N-word, which gets repeated a few dozen times, and clasps a chain around the ankles of a few audience members. Most won’t get shackled. They feel disappointed. CAPTAIN marches the audience through a doorway, into a dark “theatre.” Maybe CAPTAIN makes an offhand comment, perhaps pointing to the entranceway and declaring “The Door of No Return.” Maybe not. The sound of rattling shackles. The “theatre” smells like a latrine. It stinks. The floor moves. It rocks.
CAPTAIN
The journey begins.
The play continues…
In writing about black experience, scholars often center upon the compulsory visibility of diasporic African bodies. As a consequence of centuries of human bondage, legal limits on citizenship rights, and stereotypical popular representations, brown complexion—inaccurately labeled “black skin”—has been accorded a monitored status. A police officer is more likely to stop a motorist; a prosecutor to seek a tougher sentence; a shopkeeper to follow a customer if the stopped, accused, and followed has been recognized as black. It is for these reasons that writings on racial identity often emphasize the excessive attention (and violence) that greets the black body in innumerable public settings. This emphasis can be seen in sociologist W.E.B. DuBois’s theorization of “double consciousness,” the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” It appears in author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “letter” to his son in which he observes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”
In critically engaging the attendant experiences of blackness, it can be helpful to spotlight an individual. Focus on a person. Tell his or her story. Try to relay the perspective of folks who inhabit environments in which others look upon them with distrust, disgust, skepticism, and often fear. Share the anxieties that surface from knowing that they could be the target of violence, a verbal or physical assault, because of their skin complexion. These personal accounts, anecdotes, memories, and stories can be gathered to create a mosaic of a diverse community united by similar experiences of race.
The arts have played a significant role in relaying embodied black experience. In literature, authors have long understood that a novel offers an opportunity to mine the psychological interiority of characters in a manner unparalleled by other artistic media. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, for example, grant the reader the chance not only to see the world through the eyes of their protagonists but also to hear their comments on the many slights, injustices, and outright prejudices that they encounter. On the stage, playwrights (and production teams) have attempted to offer a sense of embodied black experience by creating characters who speak openly about their perceptions on the world in which they live. For example, the character Wolf, in August Wilson’s play Two Trains Running, observes, “every nigger you see done been to jail one time or another. The white man don’t feel right unless he got a record on these niggers.” Always aware of the precarity of blackness, he warns others, “you always under attack.”
In Character imagines a scenario in which anyone can gain access to the experience of being seen and treated as black. It invents a way to encounter history, including the past abuses that targeted diasporic Africans. From one perspective, In Character is a far-fetched play. No theatre is going to invite audience members to don the flesh of another person and role-play “black person.” From another, the play could happen but with a slight difference in staging. Immersive theatre is gaining in popularity. In addition, virtual reality (VR) technology seems to improve with each new year. It is just a matter of time before an enterprising developer creates a way for us to put on VR goggles, assume the stead of a captive, and experience the hold of a slave ship. The result will be a form of theatre.