Title: the Theatre As a Mirror for Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Place

Title: The Theatre as a Mirror for Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Place

Author: Sidney Homan
Affiliation: University of Florida, Gainesville

Abstract: Can playwrights who takes up issues of race, ethnicity, and place offer a perspective that, at very least, complements the insights of, say, sociologists or historians? Or is the stage's illusory world only a false mirror for such realities? Can a play serve as a case history? In his “epic theatre” Bertolt Brecht argues that in exposing an audience to historical, political, and economic factors shaping his characters, he allows them to contemplate the stage fiction and then to move out into the real world to affect change. Conversely, the playwright David Mamet contends that a character is not real but only dialogue there on the page, that our experience as audience is aesthetically pleasing but not to be confused with life outside the playhouse. The French playwright Genet goes a step further: the theatre is superior to reality, more “true,” in that it confesses its fakery whereas reality perpetuates the myth that it is true. A Shakespearean who works in professional and university theatres, the author considers these question by examining: Shakespeare's portrait of Othello, Lorraine Hansberry's and August Wilson's African-American families in Raisin in the Sun and Fences, the South African playwright Athol Fugard's indictment of Apartheid in Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, and the production of Black Voices, a collage of African-American literature, speeches, diaries, songs, and dance, which he wrote and directed-and where he was a (white) minority of one.