STEALING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE
The Submission is a devious, double-edged title for Jeff Talbott’s equally transgressive play. It refers both to the cold (as in out-of-nowhere) entry of a script for production consideration in the prestigious Humana Festival, and to the endgame of an ugly quest for dominance between a black actress and a gay white playwright.
Painfully produced by Pride Plays, this Chicago premiere of this award-winning script stirs up a small storm. Some questions it hurls at its audience: Who owns someone’s reality? Can it be appropriated by a different person and still be the same? Do gay men and black women hold equal claims for tolerance and respect?
Talbott’s premise is about a bad idea from the start: Danny (Nicolas Bailey), an unfledged, unsuccessful playwright—and not incidentally young, gay, and white—just got his new play accepted by the Humana Festival (a showcase of new American plays produced annually by Actors Theatre of Louisville), which pronounces the play “lean, producible, taut, mean,” etc. Unfortunately, because the drama is all about poor black folks struggling in the ghetto (and is actually called A Spade), Danny is fatefully persuaded by his straight friend Trevor (Adam Pasen) to submit it under the fictitious name of a black female playwright.
Now that it’s been preferred, it’s too late to come clean; Danny must maintain the charade. He hires local black actress Emilie (Ginneh Thomas) to impersonate his fake author. He will pay her to attend auditions and rehearsals, and even preside at the glittering premiere in Kentucky. When it’s over, she’ll supposedly tell the truth and shame the devil.
But, slowly if not inevitably, Emilie begins to take a peculiar pride of (false) ownership in this successful script. She begins to imagine that she wrote it since she might well have lived it. So, will Emilie finally follow instructions and admit that Danny, now forced to observe the birth of his baby from a distance and accept no congratulations on opening night, is the real author? Has doubting Danny lost control of his creation?
Who is the real imposter? Is it the white guy who dares to think he can convey the black experience? Or is it the black gal who steals it, if only to excuse his using the “N-word” 38 times in one scene? Her argument: Being pale and not altogether masculine, Danny can’t understand the suffering of her people or her gender, and his own suffering doesn’t count. Emilie has endured greater discrimination and prejudice, and she can never hide who she is. His being gay says nothing about who he is, just who he sleeps with (she almost calls it a choice).
Conveniently enough, the author balances Emily’s prejudices by exposing Danny’s: He’s insensitive if not racist, idiotically employing terms like “too African-y” to describe a black actor. This in turn begs another fractious question: Can a bad person write a good work? (Two words: Richard Wagner.)
The quicksand plot thickens as Trevor, who has contrivedly become Emilie’s girlfriend, gets caught in the crossfire, his loyalties as divided as the play’s protagonists. Meanwhile, Danny’s stockbroker boyfriend Peter (Edward Fraim), who watches this thespian grudge match with growing horror, serves as a useful foil to the fracas.
Talbott uses this My Fair Lady-like imposture to trigger a vicious squabble for legitimacy between two minorities (I’d call it a p.c. pissing contest but that would be sexist). The final “plague on both your houses” showdown between Emilie, playing the “race card” for all it’s worth, and Danny, reverting to a disgusting posture of unearned entitlement and all but becoming a white supremacist, erupts into an ugly cage match. Unforgivable epithets get hurled. Everyone loses face and soul in the process. It actually hurts to watch the opening of this Pandora’s Box (yes, that too sounds sexist). Will it be a compromise or an impasse in the end?
No question, director Jude Hansen makes a volatile script detonate on cue, driving home the differences, however blatantly skewed they seem. Hansen’s well-cast, fervently ardent quartet marvelously conveys every contradiction in their characters. But they can’t overcome a big hole in the story. It’s impossible to believe that the very professional Humana Festival would commit to a script, even one that arrived “over the transom,” without thoroughly vetting the author. Or does Talbott cynically imply that, because that writer bore a very African female name, the Humana script-readers couldn’t judge A Spade on its merits and gave it a p.c. pass? Either hypothesis is ridiculous and insulting. Maybe some smaller, city-wide contest but not the spring fling in Louisville.
Apart from the intrinsic excellence of Pride Plays’ production, this unpleasant evening may justify itself in the spirited post-show discussions that it inspires or ignites, hopefully between gays and straights and blacks and whites. Its biggest claim to honesty rests on the questions it raises, not on the take-no-prisoners battle it unleashes.
photos by Rayme Silverberg
The Submission
Pride Films and Plays
Apollo Studio Theatre, 2540 N. Lincoln
Sun at 7; Mon and Tues at 7:30
scheduled to end on November 25, 2014
for tickets, call 773 935 6100 or visit www.ticketmaster.com
for more info, visit www.pridefilmsandplays.com
for more info on Chicago Theater, visit www.TheatreinChicago.com