As I sat on the bumpy train ride from New York to Boston reading Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury, I began to look forward to the year ahead, wondering what was in store. Fairview served as the starting point to a semester full of discussions about race, gender, authenticity, and performance that I had considered at length as an artist, but never had had the opportunity to explore in an academic setting. In TDM97, Theater, Dance, & Media: What It Is, and How to Do It, I was exposed not only to a vast range of theater, but also to a world of performance activism and exploration that I had never considered before. Most of all, this course taught me to think critically about theater, dance, and media.
Naturally, I was thrilled when I discovered that our final exam question would cover a play by the innovative, provocative Young Jean Lee. Although I had never seen The Shipment before, I recently read Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, a play that examined representation, internalized racism, and identity within the dramatic, mainstream theater. Easy to say, I watched The Shipment with a probing eye, searching for the underlying messages behind the show.
In The Shipment, Young Jean Lee examines the performance of gender and race in various staged art forms. Compiling several different stereotypes of black performance into a single show and juxtaposing them with a white play in the second half of the show, Lee probes her audience to question the stereotypes and conventional representations that certain bodies are expected to perform on stage. She utilizes plot structure, set design, and stylistic acting choices in order to convey her messages.
The overall structure of The Shipment introduces the themes of the play in multiple ways as each new segment takes place. As I learned this semester in my playwriting class, an audience will always find an association between adjacent scenes in a single show, no matter how seemingly unrelated they appear. If I were to describe the various performances in The Shipment to a stranger, they may interpret these scenes as completely unrelated: a dance, a stand-up comedy routine, a short dramatic play, a sung trio, a longer domestic play about relationships and betrayal. However, these pieces each serve as an exemplification of the stereotype that they represent. Through each section, Young Jean Lee states to her audience: “This is another art form that we as a society expect from the black body.”
The show begins as two enthusiastic black men in pristine tuxedos dance on stage, playing into our expectations for modern black hip hop and dance culture. Next follows the stand-up act, which is delivered in a manner that is both comedic and brutally candid about racism, white guilt, and denial. Not only does this set introduce the underlying themes and injustices that fuel the overall message of the show, but it also plays into stereotypes regarding black male comedy. After diving into an aggressive criticism of black and white people, the actor illustrates the problematic notion that all male comedians must view their significant others as burdens as he mocks his wife’s squeamishness at the discussion of excretion. The next segment, the Black Play, falls into all the stereotypes of black narratives in today’s entertainment and media: drugs, shootings, rap culture, prison. Then, finally, the White Play begins. Already, the audience is alerted to a change: for the first time, white stage managers bring onto the stage a set comprised of expensive furniture and alcohol. The White Play, in contrast to the other elements of the show, portrays the stereotypes of white drama: relationship troubles, existentialism, alcoholism, and veganism. Gender, too, is stereotyped in each of the two plays. In the Black Play, the woman fulfills the role of every black woman in theater - the nagging mother, the submissive sexual partner, wise grandmother. The only woman in the White Play, Thomasina, is a kind yet determined female foil to the male lead, Thomas. Although the narratives of these two plays - the White Play and the Black Play - utilize Aristotelian drama techniques discussed in The Poetics such as the complex reversal, betrayal, story, and song, the plots themselves are not the most important part of the show.
In fact, the performance choices in each scene utilize Brechtian dramatism in order to defamiliarize the audience from the stories at hand. Throughout the entire play, the audience is alienated from the stories on stage in multiple ways. Each element of the show screams to the audience, “this is not a narrative - this is a performance.” For example, the lack of set, props, and costumes throughout the entire first half of the show, especially during the Black Play, emphasize the minimalist, message-oriented pieces. Additionally, actors take on various levels of realism in their performances, from monotonic, stoic portrayals, to over-acted, heightened deliveries. Thus, the audience never invests itself in the actual stories; rather, it is the overall concept behind each piece that really matters.
Overall, Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment is a striking, provocative piece of theater that challenges black performance art expectations. By shoving these performative stereotypes in the face of the audience, Lee forces the audience to question why the theater continues to play into these notions, highlights their problematic nature, and subsequently encourages us to challenge our preconceived understanding of the body, society, and art.