Most arguments about inequality come and go. The injustice is exposed, the battle fought, the dispute settled. The world moves on. But the wrongs of racism – and specifically of black slavery – are in a different category. It’s partly that the injustices done were so heinous, partly that discrimination persists and partly that the memory of the wrong is carried in our very bodies. More than 150 years after the US abolished slavery, the legacy of hurt lingers on.
At any rate, that is how it seems in Ars Nova’s wayward, unsettling and troublingly funny two-hander. As soon as we see Jennifer Kidwell’s teacher Caroline, sharp, wise and quick-witted, we recognise her as a black American whose view of slavery can only be personally felt. Likewise, we know Scott R Sheppard’s teacher Stuart, gauche and ingratiating, is likely to have the liberal white man’s combination of guilt and embarrassment, laced, as it turns out, with unreconstructed racism. The values Caroline holds instinctively have, for Stuart, been learned intellectually – and not always well.
So when they look upon each other, even in the throes of sexual attraction, there’s always an element of master and slave clouding the view. When they go out of their way to exorcise the ghosts of their cultural past, they seem to become more haunted and trapped by history.
That’s partly their own naivety. As playful as it is slippery, the show opens with a play within a play. Kidwell has taken on the role of an escaping slave, while Sheppard is a white abolitionist Quaker offering her safety (and a good deal of smugness). We in the audience play the middle-school assembly in Hanover, Pennsylvania, uncertain whether to take their crude acting in earnest or to laugh at its grandstanding clumsiness. Accepting our applause, they step back into schoolteacher mode – switching hilariously between disciplinarian stares and chummy camaraderie – to explain this term’s educational project.
Introducing a role-play exercise gone cringe-inducingly out of hand, they want us to enlist in either the union or confederate army, the better to understand the opposing forces of the American civil war. Depending on our team, the task is to smuggle black slave dolls from classroom to classroom or intercept their escape. This is the American railroad game. At the end, the number of successful escapees will be totted up and the winner declared. “Are you going to reaffirm or rewrite history?” they ask.
They are playing with fire, and if we’re not laughing at the outrageousness of being asked to cheer the pro-slavery confederates, we’re squirming at the awful implications of a well-intentioned educational idea. Pretty soon, the project has stirred up genuinely ugly racist sentiments. Someone uses the N-word. The teachers’ attempt to leave a painful history safely in the past falls by the wayside as the legacy of discrimination comes crashing into the present.
As it does so, Taibi Magar’s production veers from ironic comedy into sadomasochistic cruelty, Kidwell inflicting on Sheppard’s body the kind of violence her race has suffered over the generations. The implication is that slavery’s legacy is so profound that it continues polluting and corrupting relationships in the most damaging psychological way. “When you’re facing your enemy, you’re also facing yourself,” says Kidwell at the culmination of a distressing production that gets beneath everyone’s skin.
- At Traverse, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
- At Soho theatre, London, 4 September–13 October.
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