VIRGINIA IN A FEW DAYS.

Brett and I will leave on Saturday, June 5th at 8:00 PM for a caffeine-fueled 13 hour voyage the likes of which the world has never seen. The idea is to save money on a hotel by capitalizing on the fact that there are two of us, and that we are men. Counting meal breaks, we should be arriving at 12:00 noon Sunday. That, or we will have died somewhere on the way.

Thinking about returning has been rather surreal. No one that I didn't get along swimmingly with is coming back, and I'll be living with one of my best Heritage friends. We are besties.

So, I saw The Good Negro, Tracey Scott Wilson's exploration of the trials and tribulations of not only the Civil Rights Movement itself, but those of the personal lives of those fighting in the trenches.

I don't know what to think. Time to organize some thoughts via areas of production.

The lighting design was excellent in theory, though a bit rusty in practice. The way the designer backlit the massive wooden wall that composed the backdrop of the piece was really, really cool. In a moment, feeling and location could be conveyed, and considering the rapid-fire blocking that the director utilized, that was a great boon to the audience. However, there were dark spots. Big ones. In a Goodman show. A few were used to indicate a shift in location, which is great, cool, alright. But a few of the larger scenes were cut by fissures of darkness. When light is one of the major indicators of location in a show, you've got to be precise with that shit. I must say, though, there is a lighting surprise near the end of the piece that no one saw coming, lasts only for a moment, and looks really, really fucking cool.

The set was a herculean effort to move the action as far downstage as possible, because there are, what, 10 characters, with a maximum of five onstage at once, and the stage is massive. It eats subtle acting and weak voices, digests them, and spits the unintelligible mass back into the house. It was entirely wood. As in, imagine a hardwood floor of a relatively light color. Got it? Alright, now imagine the floor of the set as that hardwood, and the 18 foot wall that spans the entire breadth of the set, and the false proscenium. Were it not for the lighting cutting the space vertically and horizontally, everything would have been washed out by the stationary static of the grain surrounding the actors. And when you're doing an intimate drama in a house the size of the Albert at the Goodman, that is the exact opposite thing that you want to do.

I would like to tip my hat to the projections guy (girl? I don't have my program handy, wonderful reviewer I am.), because they were baller. And I don't use that term lightly. They masterfully demonstrated the immensity of what was being fought for, lest the audience become too embroiled in the personal lives of the characters. At just the right time, every time, the projections would turn on and say "This is the Civil Rights Movement. Right here. Keep that in mind."

I think I know how to put this, now.

I think Wilson was speaking to the black community. To be completely frank, I was surprised at the number of black audience members. From my experience, live theatre isn't something that the black community is usually a major participant in, and this show blew that conception out of the water. I can't presume to say how or if the black audience members reacted to the show in a certain way, but I think the intent was remembrance. This is where freedom from some of the most brutal oppression in human history came from. From men and women. Regular men and women like you and me. And it was the work of these brave folks that make it alright for there to even be a black audience at a prominent theatre in a major city that isn't a minstrel show.

Romeo and Juliet is such a compelling story because we know how it ends. Nothing that happens on that stage will change the course of the play, a course that was plotted for the audience at it's outset. In the same way, we know how the Civil Rights movement ended, who won, and who lost. When the lights went down on that lone minister onstage, a broken man left with nothing but the desire to free his people, he mutters "and we will keep fighting."

When the house lights come up, revealing a theatre packed with whites and blacks sitting side by side, one realizes that what what he was fighting for is this.