The White Gaze in Fairview

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning Fairview came to the Wooly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington D.C. Having enjoyed the last play I watched there I was eager to attend.

Fairview is a play centered on a “regular” middle-class black family preparing to celebrate Grandma’s birthday at home. The mother is frazzled wanting everything to be perfect. Her nice husband tries to be useful but fails. Her sassy sister just pushes all her buttons. Her brother has not yet arrived. And her teenage daughter, Keisha, is harbouring secrets.

Fairview starts off as a sitcom. Then we start to hear commentary by unseen people who at one point play the “if you can be any race, what race would you choose” game. Audience laughter slowly turning into an awkward silence. Soon these voyeurs, each white, invade the scene and enforce their race-based assumptions upon each character in the black family. The play ends with Keisha not being able to take it anymore and asking the white audience members to switch places with her.

It’s a process that becomes uncomfortable once you realise that she is no longer in character but actually inviting only the white audience members to come up on stage. She had no intentions of stopping her plea until the majority of the white audience went up. And what a crowded stage it was. But that is the point, right?

I found the “sitcom part” of Fairview funny, the white invasion disturbing, and the white audience parade onto the stage confusing. Once they were on stage though, bright lights upon them, they were ignored as Keisha continued to speak to the rest of us non-white people in our seats. I suppose the point was to make the white people uncomfortable, but I felt singled out for being non-white. Was I not being judged on the basis of my skin colour right there? Forced to participate in identity politics with all these white people up on stage peering down on me, reminded of the popular Black-American phrase “not all skin folk are kinfolk”.

In the restroom afterwards, I overheard some people of colour comment on how they felt sorry for the white audience on stage. I know I didn’t. That white audience would soon be out of the theatre where they would continue to be white people in this world. A world in which stories about black people are told predominantly by white people. Stories then imposed upon black people trying to live their lives. Their ‘white gaze’, a phrase made prominent by literary giants like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, still very much centred.

Which is why I’m loving the onslaught of Broadway shows and other creative arts that are being written by non-white people for non-white people unapologetically. Granted, Fairview would not work if the audience was not predominantly white. Nonetheless, even if these arts don’t speak to my truth I welcome the diversity. True diversity.

And with that, I leave you this. Toni Morrison, 1998, ahead of her time! May she rest in ever-powerful peace.