“Wylie Avenue Views” – Robbie McCauley, Award-Winning Actress Part II
“Learning and Talking More with Robbie McCauley”, Part II
“Everything to you is jazz. Me I’m classical,” Robbie McCauley’s daughter, composer Jessie Montgomery, http://www.jessiemontgomery.com/about/, www.jessiemontgomery.com, says in Jazz ‘n Class, a meditation on an artist-to-artist familial bond of performers in different generations. Mom, as she is described in the play, has the pulse of blues and jazz in her soul. Her child, now a woman, is fully urban, with a white father who is 100% black in his daughter’s eyes.
Jazz ‘n Class is the latest iteration in McCauley’s phased autobiographical stage drama, and, at the beginning of 2015, it was part of a triple bill called Badass, produced by Sleeping Weazel, a Boston theater company. McCauley’s performance meditation is also online in About Place Journal. There is no stop sign in the future for this dramatic tour de force who, in 1976, was on Broadway in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.
2015 was a very busy year for Robbie. She directed both The Glass Menagerie and Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams for a repertory company she heads with Marshall Hughes, an actor she worked with at Emerson College, where she taught for thirteen years. Hughes moved to Roxbury Community College, and that is now the company’s home. Its agenda is invisibly casting the classics in Roxbury, Boston’s Harlem equivalent, now undergoing the same gentrification fate.
“In Streetcar, Blanche was white and Stanley was black,” Robbie says. “The landlord was black too. The poker players were mixed. It all worked wonderfully. In the stage directions, Williams describes the neighborhood as multicultural. I didn’t change a word. In The Glass Menagerie, I just cut a reference to the brother’s cowlick. That was it. Marshall and I have started to see eye to eye on invisible casting, which means seamlessly integrating diverse racial casting.
“We enjoy seeing the social and aesthetic layers revealed in invisible casting. Mirta Tocci, a designer and artist at Emerson does our sets. We are a team. Next, in March 2016, we are doing Death of a Salesman. We did Miller’s The Crucible before. We had a black lawyer. The young women who are accused and then become the accusers were mixed. We made a big deal of the young accused women who are hung as witches in 1692. Tituba, a 17th century slave in Salem from Barbados, was said to be the ringleader, but there had to be others. Her blackness is usually a footnote in the story. We expanded it.”
Sally’s Rape remains your most iconic work. Why is that? “Today on tv, Melissa Harris Perry talked about the Texas policeman who raped several black women, and she noted how rare it is for that topic to be discussed. Sally’s Rape breached that barrier and it did so as a duet between a black woman and a white woman. I am also nude on the auction block, which was an image I wanted to embody. The play was charged. The other actress was my friend. I asked her to do this. She asked me if I wanted her to play the dumb white girl. I said I had no interest in working with a dumb white girl. So we decided to have a serious conversation about this history, and she stayed open to it. Our dialogue was partly improvised, and so very real in the moment. The play was an underground hit because I invented a dialogue process with the audience. Many people do that now. But then, it was new and different.”
Robbie, this need for cross-racial dialogue is still very much needed today. Do you see a way to encourage that dialogue from a theatrical point of view?
“I have always been fascinated by that possibility. To me, that is what theater is for, opening up real, necessary dialogue. People want to stay where they are. They don’t want to change. They talk in different ways, at cross purposes, not hearing or understanding each other. One of Anna Deavere Smith’s interviewees in Fires in the Mirror says that there is no language about race in America. It is so hard to talk about because it goes too deep. We don’t really know how to communicate. That’s what I am seeing in the Boston Busing/ Desegregation Project that I have been working on for more than a year. The story of race and class in America is an everyday reality, deep in the national ground.”
I know you are doing storytelling work with the Boston Busing/ Desegregation campaign, which is trying to reveal and heal the scars of anti-black feeling in 1970s Boston, when children and adults were violently attacked in the streets in an effort to erase their presence and participation in the city.
“At first, the city administration wanted to cover over and forget that time. But too many people had lived it and were still traumatized by it. The Union of Minority Neighborhoods took on this work to heal and get beyond yesterday. The work has been effective on some level. Some schools in Boston are now going to discuss busing. We are happy this is happening, but the change is superficial. The power structure is slicing off the change the community wants. It is not pushing for real creative teaching and learning. That is what we need, not the rhetoric that avoids the language of deep change.”
Weren’t you the one saying a few minutes ago that people don’t want to change?
“Let me rephrase. People resist change. When people can really see, they can shift their views, they can move. That is why talk helps. If you can listen, you might be able to shift how you hear things. Women have learned to listen to each other around tables. That’s what my grandmother taught me. I learned about dialogue from her and from John O’Neal of the Free Southern Theater. In the black church and in the theater, we learn about consensus. That is what amen means. The corporate ideal is not about agreement. It is about the dialectic, about difference, about right and wrong, winning and losing. I was trying to introduce a story circle for some white faculty at Emerson, and a guy asked, how do you know who wins? I laughed. It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about learning something. It’s about moving forward. It’s about growing, coming to agreement, sharing, moving forward together.”
Barbara: I feel that we are at a crucial point now. If we don’t come to consensus and we keep playing this win/lose game, we might lose much more than we realize is at stake. The world as we know it, not just in America, but especially here, is in jeopardy. We have to learn to get along.
“I agree this is a dangerous time because of our resistance to change. Too many of us don’t want to see what’s hard to face. But the world has changed. Technology has quickened the pace. We are being bombarded with the new. And it’s hard to see. Our sense of comfort is shattered, and violence is the result. I love what they decided about climate change in France. They are seeing today and the threat of now. I keep working so I stay in today. I’m directing another play in Boston this year for Sleeping Weazel, the Boston company where I performed Jazz ‘n Class. They do good, edgy theater.”
What is your artistic fuel? Is it directing, writing, or acting?
“For me, everything comes out of the acting. I always want to act. But in order to act I need something to say. So that motivates the writing. I love theater. I love plays. And when I read plays, I want to put them on. I want to see what I envision. I direct like an actor. Other directors, it comes out of design or literature. It’s an impulse to navigate what you read. For me, that is acting.”
What is it you do when you act?
“I’m real. I’m much more real when I’m acting than at any other time. In life, you are acting all the time. On stage, you have to be real. When you are in front of people and they are coming to see you, they are expecting to be relaxed in order to take in what you give them. So if you put a veneer over it, unless you let them in on the veneer, you have to be honest and real when you are being watched.”
Last week, I gave a talk about the history of Harlem theater, and I began to wonder what was it that motivated these actors and actresses, going back into the 19th century, to put themselves in front of a public that was rarely approving, rarely accepting. And what I came up with is that they wanted to be seen and fully appreciated and not diminished. Is that part of what you are talking about too?
“Yes, and I think that is a whole other aspect of acting. For black people, and any people, acting is a means of survival. How you behave determines how you are received and perceived, understood. So, you have to find what is real in order to be believable. Actors excel in that because we have to call up a sense of reality in the moment. That is what the posing in acting is about. The creativity of acting is to find and identify the real and then shape it so that others see it as beautiful and reflective and true.”
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