stage matters / By William Kowinski

The Change is Gonna Come

Color Struck strikes the right notes

(Sept. 18, 2008)  On Aug. 28, 1963, I was one of more than a quarter of a million people in the now-famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I was 17, and as magical as that day was, I recall that it was very controversial. On Aug. 28, 2008, I watched an African American accepting the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States.

But as hopeful and personally satisfying as this historic moment is, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama also exposes undercurrents of residual racism that most white people don’t normally notice.

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Race has been a topic on stage for these 40 years and more, in lots of different ways, employing different styles with different effects. The Lorraine Hansberry family drama of the 1950s stressed universality, evoking empathy. The in-your-face, up-against-the-wall confrontations of the ’60s were shocking, which opened eyes but also provoked some defensive white anger. These styles exposed the problem of how to deal honestly with the facts of racism without driving the wedge deeper between the races.

New strategies emerged in the comedy of Richard Pryor and the plays of August Wilson: using comfortable forms (traditional theatre, stand-up comedy) and showcasing cultural style (music, humor, ways of talking, etc.) but with clear evocation of the costs and realities of racism.

But over the years, as racial discrimination became less overt and less visible to whites, and pious lip service as well as sincere commitment to color blindness became standard, the realities of racism have receded from public dialogue. The racism playing out in the current presidential campaign for instance, is at the “dog whistle” level: frequencies heard and understood only by racists and their victims.

All of these pose problems and possible strategies for an on-stage attempt to deal with race in 2008, such as Color Struck, a one-person show by Donald Lacy, up from Oakland for a couple of performances recently at the Arcata Playhouse. (The show may return to Humboldt in the spring.)

Lacy has a formidable resume. He’s acted in films by Francis Ford Coppola and Taylor Bickford, and in plays by August Wilson, Brecht and Octavio Solis. He’s directed and written plays, including The Loudest Scream You’ll Never Hear, about the Atlanta child murders. He’s written for TV, and he’s a stand-up comic, with appearances on HBO and BET. He’s a radio broadcaster — you can hear him on the web at KPO.com. He’s received accolades for his humanitarian work in the Bay Area, and he’s had what I consider a major dream job: the Voice of the Harlem Globetrotters for a 75-city tour.

He brings all this experience and all these skills to bear in Color Struck. Lacy uses music, dance and projected images to evoke style (hairstyles from the conked ’40s, the processed ’50s, through the Afro-Sheen ’70s to today’s dreads) and shared experience (TV shows, family life) along with his own discoveries of racism and theories about it. He had the additional problem of being a light-skinned African American, in a black Oakland neighborhood that abutted white San Leandro.

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