Look Around

“Do your best to learn about and comprehend the experiences of people who look very different from you.”?

I recently saw the play Twilight: Los Angeles and was reminded of why theatre is the food that fills my soul. Shakespeare may have asserted, “If music be the food of love, play on,” but for me it is theatre (well, theatre and music). Twilight: Los Angeles was written by Anna Deavere Smith, and Smith originally performed the play as a solo show in 1993, following the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. As part of the creative process, she conducted interviews with 320 people, ranging from USC students and liquor store owners to former Senator of New Jersey Bill Bradley and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Smith portrayed every single interviewee on stage, adopting their mannerisms, tones of voice, body language, and essence. It was a remarkable performance, and my early introduction to a form of theatre called docudrama, which Smith invented. Smith is not only a playwright - she is also an actress, an author, a social activist, a professor, and one of my heroes. She grabbed my attention early on by intersecting the art of theatre with the call for racial equity.

Theatre has the potential to be political (think all the way back to Richard III), and it also can present the everyday struggle, be it A Raisin in the Sun or Death of a Salesman. Either way, I’ll take it. Born and raised in New York City, I had the good fortune to start attending theatre at a young age. I was quickly and easily entranced with the magic that happens when the lights go down and the performers on stage embody someone other than themselves. But my family didn’t need to enter a Broadway house filled with red velvet seats in order to consume drama. The streets of New York City explode with drama on a daily basis. Characters of all sorts roam the streets - walk down a block in any NYC neighborhood and you can observe multiple stories playing out in front of you, or just listen to the different cadences of speech in the background. Or, look at a typical day’s reporting on the Citizen app for examples: “Adult Stuck in Child Seat in Playground.” “Report of Armed Assault Involving Spatula.” “Dog Urine Mistaken for Gas Odor.” Truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction.?

It was the combination of growing up in New York City and the theatre that started my journey of putting myself in another person’s shoes, seeking to understand people from different walks of life. I attended the theatre every chance I could get, and I also ventured into acting (as an extracurricular activity), trying on different personas, delving into the motivations of a character, living in a world different from my own. Perhaps most importantly, acting taught me the skill of collaborating as part of an ensemble cast - working with a group of people to pursue a common goal of staging the best production possible, in order to delight and excite an audience.?

Twilight Bey, a former member of the LA Crips gang after whom the play Twilight: Los Angeles is named said,

“I can’t forever dwell in darkness.

I can’t forever dwell in the idea,

just identifying with people like me, and

understanding me and

mine.”

Theatre nurtured my quest to “learn about and comprehend the experiences of people who look very different from you,” and as I digested drama in either written form or in live performances, I entered a new universe each time. Whether it was witnessing the life of a Pittsburgh taxi driver in August Wilson’s Jitney, a wealthy divorcee in Noel Coward’s Private Lives (miss you Alan Rickman), or a factory worker in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, the theatre inspired my interest to pursue work as a diversity and inclusion practitioner, striving to help people appreciate the power of another perspective, and be curious about other ideologies. It primed me for a career focused on developing all types of people, helping them to consider alternate mindsets, and empowering them to relate across identity differences. Although I am not currently in a role that is squarely focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, I consider myself to be a lifelong practitioner, and the work is ongoing. The work is part of my identity as a change agent, just as theatre is part of my identity as a New Yorker.?

I haven’t been going to the theatre as much the past few years because, among other things, COVID has interfered. But thankfully I still have the various personalities on the streets of NYC to give me my daily dose of drama. And if we pause every now and then and look up from our screens, maybe we can notice that “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”