'In the Blood' goes into deep issues

Author: Elizabeth Lyon

Middlebury's production of Suzan-Lori Parks' play "In The Blood" redefined the term "off-off Broadway." Under the direction of Theater Department Visiting Professor Jaye Austin Williams, a distinguished activist-director from New York City, the cast and crew put on a play the likes of which Middlebury College rarely sees. Steve Settler, an adjudicator from the Weston Playhouse, said of the lead actor, Charzetta Nixon '06, for whom this play was a 700 Project: "If there is anybody who should be proud of a senior project in acting, it should be Charly."

Nixon played the lead role, Hester La Negrita, a homeless welfare mother who was simultaneously systematically and culturally oppressed by the rest of the cast at the same time that she played their courageous, strong, and dedicated mother. Her role was the only continuous one in the play. Will Damron '09, Leah Day '07.5, Jonathan Ellis '06, Knef King '08, and Himali Soin '08 each played double roles. Half of the time, they were Hester's bastard children. The rest of the time, they were judges of her character, fellow victims of an inescapably oppressive system, and oppressors who took advantage of her and used her exploitability to avoid culpability in her oppression.

The story was unrealistic, the characters bizarre, the plot twists inconceivable. However, King, who played Jabber, Hester's oldest son, and Chilli, her first love, said, "Some people had gripes with the play's writing. It doesn't seem real. But it isn't a piece about naturalism. It's about symbolism and representing our way of life. You lose a huge part of this play if you don't think of it as a statement."

Visiting Professor of Anthropology Linda White commented on the play's importance, saying, "A homeless African-American welfare mother is a ubiquitous sign in our society of economic inequities, racism, and sexism. She is also a symbol of our failure as a society. One of the things that makes this play so compelling is that Parks takes the spotlight off of the downtrodden homeless woman, Hester, and puts it on the bigotry, ignorance and hypocrisy of the individuals and institutions that shape reality for this homeless mother of five."

"In the Blood" opened and closed with the entire cast on catwalks above the stage blaming Hester for having children out of wedlock with five different fathers and for being illiterate, homeless, and pathetic. After the audience had heard their cruel judgment, Hester, standing in front of a chalked verdict reading, "SLUT," raised her newborn to the sky, and cooed, "My treasure, my joy," resisting classification as solely a homeless black welfare mother. In that moment, Hester embodied compassion and innocence.

Throughout the play, the audience empathized with Hester when the other characters confessed to having taken advantage of her. The Welfare Lady (Soin) spoke of bringing Hester home for a threesome, how scared she was "of catching something" and how exciting it was to slap Hester's face during sex. As clips from Nelly's "Tip Drill" played on monitors around the space, Amiga Gringa, played on crutches by extremely talented Day who tore her ACL and shattered her kneecap during the first performance, mentioned performing lesbian shows with Hester for money. Chilli dressed Hester up in a wedding gown, proposed marriage and then physically took back the dress when he realized that she had other men's children. After Reverend D. (Damron) ignored Hester's pleas for money for their child, he asked her to suck him off. He then called her a slut and went back inside.

Jabber found his mother, humiliated, lying on the stoop of the new church. Delighted that he had finally discovered the meaning of the word "SLUT," he taunted her as she cried and pleaded for him to stop. Using a police baton stolen by her other son, Trouble (Ellis), Hester beat Jabber to death. Horrified, she collapsed on top of his body, crying and screaming. The sky opened up and rain drenched her as she lay on top of Jabber's body and used his blood to write, "A," the only letter that she recognized, onto the asphalt.

As members of the audience sat, stunned, they were forced, as Director Williams intended, to "rigorously and actively recognize people that [we] might otherwise dismiss." The play made us to question our own involvement in the oppression of real-life Hesters. We normalize subsidies to agriculture but decry "welfare queens" as drags on the capitalist system. Our Protestant work ethic implicitly blames the poor for being lazy. When a woman gets pregnant, we use verbs that erase the man who impregnated her. When we think about prisoners, we think about their crimes and not the contexts within which they committed crimes. We, like the characters who confess to taking advantage of Hester without seeing themselves as perpetrators of violence, do not ask what role we play in systematic injustices. We have developed extensive, sophisticated mechanisms to avoid implicating ourselves.

"In The Blood's" power lies in what it left with the audience. It is important because of the way it echoes in memory and the way it can ripples through a community. Director Williams wrote in the playbill, "Parks implores us to examine ourselves-our place in this society, our view of it, and our individual and collective culpability in whatever oppression it perpetrates. Where are our blind spots; what facets of our society and the people who comprise it do we persistently not see, or see only through lenses that safely distance us from them-important questions we as American must ask ourselves."