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White comedy
Rough & Tumble tackles race
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
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Political correctness is dead, long live political correctness! That seems to be the rallying cry of Pieces of Whitey (at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through June 25), a new work by local playwright Patrick Gabridge. This Rough & Tumble Theatre production is well intended but too frenetic and unfocused to give insight into the multiple touchy matters regarding racial identity and racism. Gabridge uses the rapier of satire, but the laughs only nick the surface. Like much contemporary satire, Whitey comes across as brassy, overblown puffery that feeds into the very perceptions it strives to debunk. Think Anna Deavere Smith meets In Living Color. In the first of 23 rapid-fire scenes, a black couple (Karen "Mal" Malme and George Saulnier III, both of whom are white) complain to a theater honcho about having just seen a white actor play Frederick Douglass in a show he produced. The producer says he has a small company and doesn’t know any black actors. His bright idea is for the all-white cast to wear black shirts when playing black characters and white ones when portraying Caucasians. It’s a none-too-subtle way of establishing Whitey’s overarching gimmick, and it leads to some interesting notions. For example, seeing quarterback-sized Josh Pritchard (who’s white) swagger into a suburban living room pimped out as a "Rent-A-Homey" points to "wiggers" as a modern burlesque of blackface. The episodic scenes, which director Dan Milstein keeps moving at a breezy pace, follow two story lines: a prim, squeaky-clean white Weston family prepare for their daughter’s interracial marriage while white playwright Fred navigates bureaucratic webs and dodges rigid societal stigmas to get authorization to write a play with black characters. Fred’s journey, which includes his having to prove to a licensing agent his multicultural exposure and sensitivity, appears to be an exaggerated depiction of the quandaries Gabridge faces as a white playwright addressing race relations. Whitey is billed as "a comedy about race by a bunch of white people. Could be a train wreck." That’s as if to say "Hey look: at least we’re acknowledging our gnarly situation." But the play’s cartoonish comedy is laid on so thick, it undermines the issues. Another problem is that the evening clocks in at an unruly two and a half hours. And Whitey is fixed at such a high pitch — a screeching level of campy satire — that you’re apt to have little investment in the characters’ psyches and even less in their problems.
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