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BLUE DOOR: A PLAY WITH ORIGINAL SONGS. By Tanya Barfield. Directed by Trazana Beverly. PlayMakers Repertory Company, Center for Dramatic Art, Chapel Hill, NC. 5 November 2008.
How can theatre effectively explore the complexities of racial heritage and identity? While the regional premiere of Blue Door at Playmakers Repertory Company proved compelling theatre in its own right, the framework of the recent presidential election provides a striking context in which this question can be reexamined.
Historically, North Carolina stood at the epicenter of a tobacco industry built upon slave labor. During the time of this production, North Carolina emerged as a toss-up state, with the potential for its fifteen electoral votes to count as Democratic for the first time since 1976-a year after Playmakers's founding. The particular performance I witnessed took place less than twenty-four hours after Barack Obama was declared the first African American president of the United States. These same negotiations between past and present and across racial binaries fueled Tanya Barfield's 2006 self-proclaimed "Meditation on Blackness."
Like August Wilson's dramatic epics, Blue Door proposes that one must not only acknowledge, but also embrace, the past. To reinforce this theme, playwright Tanya Barfield and director Trazana Beverly honored the past through performance tropes, incorporating conventions informed by oral-history storytelling, Negro spirituals, and movement forms reminiscent of twentieth-century choreopoems. Barack Obama, while campaigning for and winning the presidency, espoused the same message and engaged in a parallel process of honoring the past.
Blue Door tells the story of Lewis, a successful, assimilated African American mathematics professor forced to confront his racial heritage and identity when his wife, a white woman, divorces him for his refusal to attend the 1995 Million Man March on Washington. While he does not consider the march relevant to his own life, his wife feels that Lewis's decision exemplifies his "resistance" to accepting his African American identity, preventing him from being a...