Category Archives: MSPS

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We Cannot Turn Back

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As another Martin Luther King, Jr. Day approaches, MSPS reflects on the dream at Notre Dame.

The other night I heard a community organizer from South Bend speak. They call him Brother Sage, a name he earned while serving as principal for a failing elementary school in East St. Louis, as he says “a neighborhood where kids wake up in the morning and gargle razor-water.”

Brother Sage recalled his teenage years in 1964, when a barber in his hometown in Ohio refused to cut the hair of African Americans. Yet, in the same breath, Brother Sage called for striving for peace among all communities.

I asked, “How do you attain peace? How can you build trust with the barber, or a community other than your own, that doesn’t share your beliefs?”

He replied, “Go outside your comfort-zone.”

What I really wanted him to tell me was, “well, it’s ABC…” but the truth is that there are no guidelines to overcoming the bitterness of bigotry. There are no guidelines for creating for a just society. There is no single way to engage with others who may not share your perspective, or may in fact, staunchly oppose it.

The reality is that individuals who agree with the barber in Ohio still exist.

The reality is that those elementary students who attended Brother Sage’s School were born into low-income housing, born into a system that secludes them from access to an equitable education, born into a generational cycle of poverty.

Desegregation and equal access to education – these are two of the issues that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life for but they are still prevalent today. How can we work towards making Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream for freedom and justice a reality?

Like Brother Sage said, one way to strive for peace is getting comfortable with being a little uncomfortable.

“As we walk, we must make the pledge
that we shall march ahead.
We cannot turn back.” – MLK

Is Theatre for White People?

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Written for MSPS by Ally Kwun

 

Eighty-three percent of of all (Broadway) tickets were purchased by Caucasian theatregoers.

Bam.

What do you think of that?

That statistic is part of The Broadway League’s annual report on demographics of their audience from mid-2010 to mid-2011.  There were many other interesting points that they made, such as that 65% of theatregoers were female, that 62% were tourists, and for those over 25 years old, 78% of them had completed college and 39% had a graduate degree.

So we know that the majority of Broadway theatregoers are white, female, not from NYC (booo) and well-educated.

What are the implications of that?

(Those are just the things I thought tickled my brain. Here’s the report so you can pick and choose your own: http://www.broadwayleague.com/index.php?url_identifier=the-demographics-of-the-broadway-audience. Note: I did not buy the full $25 report I’m too cheap I’m taking all of this from the executive summary.)

I think this all comes down to WHY IS DIVERSITY IMPORTANT IN THEATRE? Is it necessary? Is it the same issue as diversity in general? Is diversity in theatre possible?

All important questions I have no idea how to answer. And like all things I don’t know what to do with, I google it.

Here is what I found:
The Greater-White-Than-Ever Way
Sh*t White Theatremakers Say
More Sh*t White Theatremakers Say
Okay, then. Let’s Really Talk About It.
More Statistics That Are Useful for the Race and Theatre Discussion

Read them. Comment on them. Join the conversation.

What if Jean Valjean was Black in America today?

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What if Jean Valjean was black?

In America.

Today.

This week, forty-five Notre Dame students will travel to the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago to experience the 25th Anniversary Tour of the epic musical, Les Miserables, the popular theatrical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s critique of nineteenth-century French caste society.

Jean Valjean is the show’s celebrated central hero: An ex-convict who breaks parole after serving a nineteen-year hard-labor sentence simply for robbing a house in order to feed his sister’s dying child. A punishment that seems outrageous to the audience’s ears.

Once paroled, Valjean runs into all kinds of barriers in place to keep him from any upward social mobility. Not to mention he will be hunted throughout the show by the musical’s main antagonist, Police Inspector Javert.

Though not always, the hero Jean Valjean is typically played by a white performer.

And in light of some recent critical research and scholarship about the histories and accounts of experiences of black men and other men of color in the segregated criminal justice system in the United States, Valjean’s Les Miz epic might have a lot to offer a discussion of our time and our place if we would consider, even for a moment, the counter-factual question:

“What if Jean Valjean was black in America today?”

Would he be able to achieve what the character Valjean achieves? Would we still cheer for him?

Do we?

I’ll leave it open for now, though I will posit that we might not have to rack our brains too much to answer this question. The difficult history of racial caste relations in America and its equally unsettling relationship with punitive justice, nonviolent crimes, and especially the War on Drugs have been explained critically enough in recent years by scholars such as Michelle Alexander.

And so although the audience smiles and applauds when Jean Valjean is able to break free of his oppressive system and achieve a wild, swashbuckling and fulfilling life, I hope that we don’t ignore the very real possibility that the situation of the dashing, singing character Valjean seen at the beginning of the musical might not be very different at all from the real-life situation of the man standing just outside the Cadillac Palace in downtown Chicago and holding the sign: