Fairview

Most plays can be enjoyed while being read. Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, O'Neill, I've read their work and been able to create in my mind's eye the story they're telling. A few hundred years ago there was something called a closet drama, which was a play never meant to be staged but simply to be read. Fairview ain't no closet drama.

The winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Jackie Sibblies Drury's play demands to be seen, as the audience is very much involved with the production. Also, reading the play the first time I wasn't able to accurately imagine what was going on. I had to read a few reviews and watch a few interviews to fully understand what was happening.

Fairview begins like a parody of a TV sit-com, like The Jeffersons. A black family is preparing for the grandmother's birthday. Beverly is obsessively chopping carrots. Her dutiful husband is being sent on errands. She has a sister, a kind of caricature of the sassy black woman, who speaks in zingers. There is a teenage daughter, who wants to take a year off before she goes to college. You can almost hear the laugh track. At the end of Act I, Beverly faints.

The play then goes down the rabbit hole. In the second act the actors repeat the first act in gesture, while the audience hears a recording of four white voices, who are watching the play. They have an inane conversation answering the question, "If you could be any race, what would you choose?" This is a topic that no white person would have in front of a person who was not white. It suggests races could be like something you pick out in a boutique and try on, like a hat. One person says Asian, another says "Latinx," using the new gender-free designation. Another says Slav, which is pointed out really isn't a race, but an ethnicity.

In the third act, these actors invade the stage, taking on the roles of black stereotypes, and there almost seems to be a struggle between the actors from the two arenas. At the very end of the play Keisha, the teenager, breaks the fourth wall and invites the white audience members to change places with her. One critic cited that at the production he attended audience members actually talked back to the play.

Fairview is a play that makes us confront race, and it is a real confrontation. This would be a hard play to fall asleep to. Many white people have been offended by the play, as it suggests that we all have some racism in us, but I think that's true. Unless you are raised in some kind of utopian commune, we have all been indoctrinated to a certain degree to think of race as something that separates us, that makes us an "other."

During the voiceover one of the actors makes a long speech about the movie Hostel, which is a horror movie about a place in Eastern Europe where people are kidnapped and then tortured by rich people. The movie centers on the young people who are caught there and then escape, but the actor wonders about the rich people--how did they come to acquire this morbid hobby? How do we become racist? How do we learn to hate? Fairview raises some provocative questions, and we struggle to answer them.