Feb. 22, 2012 - Issue #853: Folkways

Race

To point out that we're still living in a world where skin colour plays heavily into the distribution of politics and power seems an almost depressingly bland gesture, but, well, there it is: regardless of the current president's skin colour, privilege still weighs heavily towards the white and the male populations, with power following in a cozy dovetail. It's no longer a completely exclusive bubble, perhaps, but one that seems carefully content to avoid any major changes or shifts in its balance—if anything, the waning discussion, happening without a growing redistribution of power, is its most troubling characteristic.

Race is, in short, an issue that's still very alive, and one that Heather Inglis was stewing over, and what eventually drew her to David Mamet's 2009 whudunnit.

'My reading of Canadian politics and international politics is that, as the world gets closer together, it appears to me that we have a lot of issues with skin colour and who our tribe is and who our tribes are not," Inglis explains. "I feel in Canada they're fairly buried—I'm caucasian, I'm of European descent, so I obviously come at life from the point of view of being priviledged, but a lot of people don't share that in Canada, increasingly. And I've always had this sense that there's something deeper there that we—we meaning the privileged—weren't acknowledging very well. And I think because we have the banner of multiculturalism, it's really easy to say, 'We're multicultural, and so we don't have any issues.' And I, in fact, think, have always sensed that, we do have issues, just that we don't talk about them, and the fact that we don't talk about them actually means we have an a issue."

Inglis has never really pulled any punches on the theatre she chooses to explore—her last Theatre Yes production, at the 2010 Fringe, was the controversial location-specific Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, and prior to that she explored the politically charged in My Name is Rachel Corrie, the English activist tragically crushed under a bulldozer while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip. In that sense, she seems a kindred spirit of Mamet, a playwright known for theatre that tears into the ill realities of the world at large around him. Race follows a pair of lawyers attempting to discover if a white billionare is in fact guilty of allegedly raping a poor black woman in a motel room. It isn't looking to present a comfortable, easy to defend perspective; its blunt exploration looks to go straight for your own inhibitions, thoughts and feelings about race, and challenge them directly, for better or worse.

"It's a play where we've been forced to be really courageous and really honest about what we understand and don't understand," Inglis notes of the process she's been going through with the cast.  "What our preconceptions are, about race, about sex, about the combination of race and sex—all of those things. So great discussions, a really wonderful group of actors who are really fearless, and really precise in their thinking about it, and really curious.

"Because he's Mamet, and he doesn't actually believe in preaching to people—he doesn't believe that's the purpose of theatre—what you end up with is a very fascinating investigation of race, where everybody is right and wrong, from their own perspective."

Thu, Feb 23 – Sat, Feb 25; Tue, Feb 28 – Sat, Mar 3; Tue, Mar 6 – Sat, Mar 10 (8 pm; 2 pm matinees Sun, Feb 26 and weekends thereafter)
Directed by Heather Inglis
Catalyst Theatre, $20 – $32
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