In the March issue I wrote a piece about a production of Jean Genet's The Blacks, done by the Classic Theatre of Harlem.  I described a situation that I felt crossed the boundary between actor and audience when one of the actors (African American) deliberately humiliated two white audience members.  On February 18, I wrote a letter to the artistic directors, the actor, and their funding sources where I stated that "by descending to insult and false assumptions about racial identity and unity, you failed as humanists and artists."

What was the response?

A month later -- nothing from nobody.

Finally, in late March I contacted my friend at the New York State Council on the Arts (I will call her Hannah) -- she was on the "cc:" list for the letter -- and asked her if she had ever received the letter. Here was her reply:

Oh, the letter caused such a crisis. I have mixed feelings about it. I think we should all express our opinions, but your letter might have lost this company funding. And, Michael, they are an excellent and necessary company. One moment, with which you took issue, one artistic choice, should not imperil a company. I didn't see the show, so can't comment directly. But most of the NYSC staff -- black and white -- did, and felt quite differently-- thankfully.  From your description, I probably would have lauded their courage in offending or provoking an audience, while most of the dreck I see requires stupefied passivity. That's what makes horse-racing. In any case, and I say this with love, as a righteous and sometimes hot-headed person, I urge you to consider in the future engaging with the artists -- giving them feedback and not potentially injuring the livelihood of the sincere and hard-working group. Really, I say turn your anger at THE ROUNDABOUT and Lincoln Center and others that NEVER hire women or people of color, produce plays that are sexist, morally and artistically bankrupt, eat up the majority of public funding while catering to terrifically affluent old white susbcribers whose tickets are subsidized by your tax dollars. Or just vigorously support the organizations you admire. More than half of them will soon be gone. Hoping you are well.

Here was my response to her (interspersed with quotations from her original):

Hannah, thank you for letting me know about the response to the letter.  Yours is the first and only answer  -- neither of the theatre's co-artistic directors ever responded to the letter.
Your response made me (re)think a great deal about the event and my response, and if I can presume upon your patience, I'd like to respond (briefly) to what you sent me.

Hannah wrote:

Oh, the letter caused such a crisis.  I have mixed feelings about it. I think we should all                  express our opinions, but your letter might have lost this company funding.

Was this an actual possibility -- that one letter would carry such weight?  You mention that other NYSC staff saw the show, saw it differently than I did, and that "thankfully" they felt differently -- so I am assuming that their funding is still secure.  In any case, I wouldn't have said anything different even if I thought their funding was at stake -- if their point was to provoke a response, then they or the funders can't really complain when a response comes in, regardless of its shape or heat, as long as it's honest.

         ...they are an excellent and necessary company.

I don't disagree with that -- I liked their adaptation of Native Son -- but, again, they are not exempt from what they provoke.

From your description, I probably would have lauded their courage in offending or provoking an audience, while most of the dreck I see requires stupefied passivity.

After the seeing the show, and then again after reading your words, I wrestled with that word "courage" -- were they courageous in what they did?  what does that word mean in this context?  was there a real risk at stake for them?  After chewing on this, I have to say that they probably thought they were courageous in being so provocative, but, to me, given the power imbalance between audience and performer (that "audience courteousness" I mentioned in my letter), what they did was not courageous.  I found it insulting -- not so much the racial content of the provocation, but the way the audience people were used.  If there is a space in our culture where people are not used -- as employees, as consumers, as cannon fodder -- it should be in art, and especially in theatre.  It would have taken real courage to be gentle or compassionate rather than surgical.  But compassion won't sell tickets.

No, let me take that last sentence back -- too snide.  When several dozen people in an evening make the effort to trek to 145th Street to see a show, they have already self-selected as people who support innovative, off-to-the-side, not-Roundabout theatre.  These people should be treasured, especially white people (as much as I hate to use that construction) who in coming there are crossing a number of borders (real or imagined).  I don't mean for "the white people" to be exalted, etc. -- all that old racial stereotype crap.  And I hate singling out "white people" as a subset of "theatre-goers at Classic Theatre of Harlem" -- the darkness of the theatre is a democratic space, like the theatron in the ancient Greek theatres.  My point is this: anyone sitting their butts in those seats on 145th Street is a compatriot, a compañero/a, and they should be welcome guests in the house.  I don't mind being prodded and provoked, but I won't tolerate being made to feel unwelcome.  And that was the "sin" I saw that night: the hospitality of the house was violated.

In any case, and I say this with love, as a righteous and sometimes hot-headed person, I urge you to consider in the future engaging with the artists -- giving them feedback and not potentially injuring the livelihood of the sincere and hard-working group.

As I said above, neither of the theatre's co-artistic directors ever responded to the letter, so there was no chance for the kind of "feedback" you suggest.  I would have liked the engagement, would have found it healing to have the talk.  But, also, why keep it just in-house?  If a vigorous response was expected, it's what they got, even if it wasn't in a form that accommodated them.  I thought a lot about sending the letter out to other people and then decided that since they had decided to make their choice "public," then I could go that same route.

As an aside.  My nephew actually came up with a response to this that I would have put in motion if I had had the time and money.  Since one of the things that angered me that night was how the "owners" of the "means of production" used an unfair advantage on the audience, the appropriate thing to do (a lá Augusto Boal) was to re-capture the means of production and make your own theatre.  I was going to enlist a suite of trusted friends, buy them tickets, and when the scene came up, engage in a version of Invisible Theatre in challenging what they were doing.  Who knows how that would have ended up, but it seemed (at least at the time) a more positive way to meet the Company on its own grounds and give a voice to those in the audience who may have been intimated or reticent.  (Perhaps I'll write a play about it!)

Really, I say turn your anger at THE ROUNDABOUT and Lincoln Center and others that NEVER hire women or people of color, produce plays that are sexist, morally and artistically bankrupt, eat of the majority of public funding while catering to terrifically affkuent old white susbcribers whose tickets are subsidized by your tax dollars. Or just  vigorously support the organizations you admire. More than half of them will soon be gone. Hoping you are well.

I'm not sure anger at The Roundabout or Lincoln Center is appropriate -- they do what they do within the framework of the way the system is set up.  The better thing to do is as you suggest: support whom you love and build your own road as you walk it.

Well, enough presumption upon your time.  Hannah, thank you again for your patience and attention. Stay in touch.

There was one final exchange, Hannah to me:

Thanks for your thoughtful response. We just disagree, but it is still a pleasure to see how much you care. The dirty secret about NYSCA and other gov't funders is that an hint of scandal or controversy can lose a theatre funding. NYSCA's boss is the governor so when the administration gets such a letter, they just don't want trouble. They do not engage in thinking about aesthetics or philosophy. Sadly we get so few letters. I received one in three years complaining that we funded a theatre which excluded men. A grant was once threatened because it was presumed to be pornographic. The word pornography was in the title. It was an academic deconstruction. Sometimes I think we must leave it to the individual response. I still think you should be angrier about the other theatres, which are discriminatory and eat up most public funding-- your tax dollars.

If you can bear with this, then one more exchange of ideas, between Ned Bobkoff (of this journal) and I, in response to his letter to the Scene4 editor. First, his letter.

Back in the sixties I had the opportunity to see the Negro Ensemble Company's ground breaking production of Genet's "The Blacks". Those were the days when they were down on Second Avenue, close to Ratners, where I always had my borscht, lox and bagels before or after going to the theatre. The cast was superb: James Earl Jones, Arthur French,  and a host of other equally fine performers. Michael Bettancourt's reaction to the Classical Theatre of Harlem's production of the intrigued me. After reading his  reaction to an audience member being subjected to embarrassment and manipulation, a white person made to feel that she was part of the establishment perpetuating racism, I hope I would have had the courage to slap the actor taking advantage of her down by improvising off him with wit and endless good will. He would then be in the same place I was. I would be standing up, facing him squarely, and he would be on stage, facing me squarely. In the strange and wonderful environment of the theatre, we would be, finally, after all these years of seperation and discrimination between audiences and actors, EQUAL. Wouldn't that be  great? He would have to break out of his appointed role as a performer, and I would have to break out of my appointed role as an audience member.  We would be both be taking risks together; improvising as one. We would be improvising on equal ground for the job of working on stage and getting paid for it.  And if I beat him at it, and if I won, based on the audience's applause, if I did his job better than he did, I might get his role. Finally getting the break, I've been looking for all my life.  He'd be out of a job, and I'd have the opportunity to step in and replace him. And I wouldn't be ashamed about it either. I'd cover my face with grease paint. I'd do his job in black face. Wouldn't that be a clown show?  To paraphrase Kipling:  If you can keep your wits when all about you are losing theirs, why not?

My response:

Ned, thanks for this response -- it's one of the few I've received about both the piece and the incident.  The theatre never responded to my letter, nor did any of the cc:'s I sent out.  I did get a response from my friend at the New York State Council on the Arts, who counseled me not to air such ideas with the NYSCA because it could lose the theatre it's funding and I should take up the matter on the QT with the theatre itself -- which would be fine if the theatre actually responded to the letter.  And so on and so on.

I love your imagining of the "face-off" between actor and audience (in their "appointed" roles -- excellent phrase), and I wish I were built as a person to have the necessary lightness and wryness to have tried to pull something like that off.  (My wife sometimes likens me to Jeremiah, who was probably not a fun guy to be around).  My other thought, which I may have mentioned in the piece, was to go back with a crew of  folks prepared to take over the "means of production" and do exactly what you propose (though with the responsibility and opportunity spread out among us).

And perhaps, as I get older, I get less and less enamored of "correcting" and "instructing" the audience.  Challenging, yes -- asking them to do some heavy hauling morally and aurally -- yes.  But at all times to consider them as collaborators and compatriots.

Again, thanks for taking the time to write.

What to make of all this teapot tempest?  As much as I like Hannah, I have a hard time abiding the rigidity of her liberalism, the categorization of people into "choir" and "non-choir."  And I especially dislike this notion that somehow trespasses need to be kept "within the family" and not allowed to flail about in the untidy world of history and ogres.  My impulse to write the letter ultimately came from my belief that major segments of my beloved art form too often refuse to engage the terra cognita around them, and so end up incested and theoretical and Roundabout.  An angry audience member -- one not just aesthetically pissed but morally incensed -- may be such a novelty that no one knows how to deal with it, and, worse, the artists may believe that they don't have to deal with it since anger like this is, well, just so retro in our pomo deconstructed virtualities.

I liked Ned's response: grab the balls and squeeze and see what happens. In fact, more testicularity and less art (to badly paraphrase the Bard) may be just the embrace that febrile Thespis needs to become an artist joyfully mud-wrestling with the world around him.

So, thus ends this tale -- neither in whimpers nor bangs but with the usual irresolutions.  Until the next time, when this butt will most definitely not stay in the seat it has paid for.

©2003 Michael Bettencourt

For more commentary and articles by Michael Bettencourt, check the Archives.

Michael Bettencourt has had his plays
produced in New York, Chicago,
Boston, and Los Angeles, among others.
Continued thanks to his "prime mate" and wife, Maria-Beatriz

© 2003 Aviar-DKA Ltd. All rights reserved (including authors' and individual copyrights as indicated). No
part of this material may be reproduced, translated, transmitted, framed or stored in a retrieval system for
public or private use without the written permission of the publisher and the individual copyright holder.
For permissions, contact publishers@scene4.com

.

All articles are archived on this site.
To access the Archives