melpomine

[melpomine]

Calpurnia

Feb. 04 2018 2:30 PM  90 minutes no intermission Buddies in Bad Times Theatre A Nightwood Theatre and Sulong Theatre co-production Written and Directed by Audrey Dwyer

According to their program, this play is “A classic novel turned on its head. A dinner party gone wrong.” This is about as vague as preliminaries get, and I find out why as the play goes on--but more on that in a bit.

As we walk into the traverse space, patrons are aurally immersed into the soundscape of a gentle piano. The music captures the essence of the novel off of which the play is based--it is sweet and serious and tells a story. I settle into my front-row seat I feel excited and at-ease--a familiar sensation to anyone who has read and re-read the novel. 

The stage is built to look like a realistic, affluent living room, and it does this exceptionally well. It has a fully-equipped kitchen off to one side (SR from where I was sitting, SL from the opposite side) with a working refrigerator, countertops, cupboards, etc. Centre-stage there is a large dining table, and opposite to the kitchen is the front door from where characters enter and exit. Everything is just right. And then the play begins.

Julie, our lead (Meghan Swaby) is an aspiring writer attempting a screenplay spinoff about Calpurnia--the iconic black caregiver from Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird.” She is on a strict deadline and has gotten notes from her agent that the character is as too upper-class. From the get-go, Julie plays anger and frustration so well that one buys into it for the entire play, trusting that the reason for her anger will become apparent eventually. It doesn’t. This disposition is contrasted by Precy (Carolyn Fe) who is a jovial and maybe even submissive nanny. Of all the characters, Precy seems to be the most fully developed, and she is probably my favourite thing about the play. It makes a WOC maid (Precy) a lead. In this production, Precy is a middle-aged Filipino live-in nanny who defies stereotype. However, this segues into my least favourite thing about the play as well. Despite being a response to Harper Lee’s Calpurnia, wherein the playwright submits that she is undermined and overlooked, this play actively chooses to turn the upper-class black woman into a maid for the majority of the play. Contextually, she does this in efforts to research what it’s like to engage in maid-like duties. This is maddening to me.  The two black men (her father and her brother) get to keep their wits; the white woman gets to appear like the rational girl trying to calm a black woman. My qualm is not that Julie isn’t likeable; that’s a juvenile non-criticism which exists mainly for the commercial masses to pick at. It’s that her character misrepresents what so much of the black community faces. Julie represents the underdog, whereas her younger brother Mark, in dialogue, is an apologist with whom were a meant to vehemently disagree. Perhaps this is the art’s true mastery: it presents two very incorrect characters .

Dramaturgically:

At around the halfway point, there is a musical interlude to indicate the passage of time. It was quite long, and the lighting confusingly indicated that a lot more time passed than really did. 

I didn’t understand to place a fully-equipped kitchen so far SL/SR that at any given time, the majority of the audience would not be able to see what’s going on there. Much of the action unfolds there for strenuous periods of time, and we could only crane our necks for so long before giving up altogether. This choice was a result of making the space look as close to a real kitchen as possible. Well, it looks real, but it doesn’t work, and thus the important distinction between realism and naturalism emerges. 

To be frank, it seems like this play was riding off the coattails of a title which has now become a buzzword. (I mean, ditto: Go Set A Watchman.) The narrative would’ve stayed exactly the same were Julie working on a screenplay about a black maid--period. But would the show have sold as many tickets had it gone with the “unbranded” iteration of the same story? Isn’t the choice to link the tale to one of the most famous black nannies in our zeitgeist counter-productive to the dramaturgy? I know I would’ve been far more interested in the story about any black woman, but it seems the playwright didn’t believe this, and risked her story for it. Any references to the novel were inaccurate and contrived.

Atticus is said to have slut-shamed Mayella during the court scene, which, textually or sub-textually, just never, ever happens. I went back to those chapters and combed over them so I could contextualize whatever quote was being taken way out of context, but it doesn’t even exist. Atticus never mentions Mayella’s sex life, and he shouldn’t. The fact of the case is that her father rapes her and then they both choose to blame it on Tom Robinson. Atticus only ever asks Mayella whether her father beat her, or Tom; whether her father raped her, or Tom. In his closing statement he certainly goes on to shame the jury for hating Mayella’s for her desire to kiss a black man, and I just don’t see how that can be twisted into the man slut-shaming her.

The rest of the character flaws are speculative. Julie believes Atticus wouldn’t have paid Calpurnia “because some of them didn’t”--although the narrative explicitly states the opposite. She also thinks Atticus would’ve hit her “because some of them did”--the them being white slave-owners, of course. Julie believes it’s horrid that Scout, a six-year-old white girl teaches Calpurnia to “speak well” when the exact opposite is true. Calpurnia’s use of language in the novel is so eloquent that Scout is constantly asking her for the meanings of Atticus’ legal jargon, and is further confused when Calpurnia switches dialects during church. 

The one accurate and worthy criticism of the character in the story is that in advising his daughter, Scout, to not use the n-word, he uses the word himself. He could’ve quite easily avoided this, just as I have now. There is no justification for this, only a post script to say that he never uses that word in the presence of a black person, and when he does say it behind their backs it is not to degrade but to divert. 

To all this, the unsuspecting (mainly white) audience who can only faintly recall the narrative nods in enthusiastic ally-ship, ready to discard their beloved classic (much like the character of Christine) if it’s outdated now as the play claims it is. This is not sustainable viewership. A simple fact-check renders much of the novel’s criticism inaccurate. It would’ve been far more effective to go off of the iteration of Atticus published in Go Set A Watchman. The two versions could not be further apart. Both were a result of Lee’s fascination with her father, Amasa Coleman Lee. If we’re reading biographically (which I believe is an uninteresting way to read--well--anything) then the “real Atticus” was a white supremacist and a rampant segregationist. The venn-diagram of Lee’s Atticus’ and Dwyer’s Atticus are two repellant circles.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Although I have been enamoured with the character of Atticus for about seven years, now, I have since chronicled several flaws with our cultural admiration of his. At the end of the day he is still an old, white man, remembered and cherished over his black counterparts and betters.

I probably would’ve written a more satisfied review as someone who didn’t feel swindled by the classic bait ‘n’ switch. 

#theatre #Audrey Dwyer #Calpurnia #To Kill A Mockingbird #BuddiesInBadTimeTheatre