Current Commentary
Yellowman addresses the issue of interracial prejudice
By Frederick M. Winship
NEW YORK, (UPI) -- America's most covert prejudice, internal racism among black people, is the subject of Dael Orlandersmith's play "Yellowman," a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Originally produced at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., the play can be seen at City Center Stage 1 as a Manhattan Theater Club offering. It stars Orlandersmith as the dark-skinned Alma and Howard W. Overshown as the lighter Eugene, a couple of star-crossed lovers doomed by the color of their skins.
"Certainly 'Yellowman' and the subject of interracial prejudice can make many black people squirm, but the prejudice is not exclusive to us," Orlandersmith said in an interview. "On every human level every group of people does this. It's the kind of thing that makes Italian and Jewish girls go out and get nose jobs.
"In writing this play I wanted to look at how many black people have taken on the very racism that has been done to us. There are those -- the lighter-skinned -- who give darker-skinned people a hard time, and I've seen the flip side where lighter-skinned people have been made to feel bad simply for being light."
It has taken courage for Orlandersmith, acclaimed for such previous plays as "Beauty's Daughter" and "The Gimmick," to take on this taboo subject in dramatic form, but her authoritative narrative style and her poet's talent for writing in the cadenced speech of southern blacks carries the day. "Yellowman" provides theatergoers with an experience as rich and complex as they are likely to encounter in the theater this season.
The character of Alma expresses herself in a form of blank verse, summoning up imagery, some of it earthy and some of it beautiful, that sticks in the mind like a familiar melody. She has been born with ambition and is always hopeful of moving beyond her South Carolina Gullah roots and finally does -- in quest of a college degree.
Eugene, son of a handsome, dark-skinned father and a light-skinned mother who gave up her family to marry him, is a sweetly appealing mixture of softness and virility. He is content to stay in South Carolina, where he becomes heir to his almost white grandfather's valuable property.
This legacy brings him to blows with his resentful father and the play to a tragic conclusion.
Speaking in counterpoint, Alma and Eugene reveal how their fathers -- hers "high yella" and his "jet-black niggerstuff" -- have mistreated their wives. Alma's father used her dark mother, Ordelia, as an unloved breeding animal who is forced to work the fields when not having children, then abandoned her. Eugene's father betrayed his light-colored wife, Thelma, with other women.
Alma is determined not to turn into her querulous, hard-drinking mother who insists Eugene will drop her for other women of his own skin color. She takes the audience with her to New York where she is accepted as a scholarship student at Hunter College. She embraces New York wholeheartedly and hopes to convince Eugene to move north. He visits her and they become lovers.
Alma accepts Eugene's proposal of marriage, even though it means returning to South Carolina and facing the disapproval of his light-skinned relatives. But after he is imprisoned for the murder of his father, Eugene learns that she has returned to New York. Behind bars, he muses about "soft Southern women, like Momma and Alma," remembering Alma in a lilac dress wearing lilac perfume and what he said to her:
"I said, "Alma you look so good in that dress/ you really do/ you look good/ why'd you have to look so good?"
Orlandersmith and Overshown are giving gripping performances that claim an audience's concentrated attention for 90 minutes under the skillful direction of Blanca Zizka. The playwright shows her versatility as an actress in various roles, including that of narrator and Ordelia.
Overshown, who played Felicia Rashad's son in "Blue" Off Broadway last season, is equally effective playing Eugene's father and grandfather.
Klara Zieblerova has designed a minimal set consisting of only two chairs and a backdrop on which photographs are projected suggesting southern vegetation and a pair of eyes. Russell Champa's moody lighting is even more important than the set or the everyday costumes designed by Janus Stefanowicz. Elliott Sharp's impressionistic musical effects are lovely but unobtrusive.