“Art hurts. Art urges voyages- and it’s easier to stay home.”
-Gwendolyn Brooks
This play is about lines. A simple statement. But very rarely is anything so simple, if you stare at it hard enough. Obviousness is often an easy façade for a lack of interest in true complexity.
One of the more salient feature about lines, both the play that you’ll see tonight and the concept of a line itself, is that they refer to multiple things with similar features- Boundaries, physical and mental, institutional and social. They can even refer to color lines drawn on the maps of the Roosevelt era Federal Housing Administration that coded neighborhoods in Grand Rapids, often based on the color or race of the people living there.
Lines: The Lived Experience of Race is also a multifaceted phenomenon. First performed six years ago at Actors’ Theater Grand Rapids, the production focused on a microscope’s eye view of Grand Rapids, with emphasis on the southeast side of the petri dish. Using transcripts of 177 real interviews with people in our community, it attempted to delineate a conversation about racial inequality and systematic injustice.
Six years after its original debut, some may be wondering, why Lines? Why have this conversation again?
The only response I have is that the lines in this city warp. Since the original production in 2010, race relations have altered dramatically in America, especially with the national spotlight throwing the killing of young black men by white police forces into light. While this is not a new conversation, it gives the issues contained in the play a renewed vitality, and a farther impetus to be heard.
Race lines change with time, and so must the theatre.
Reflecting the space of five or six years, one of the first things the director, Stephanie Sandberg, and I did was alter the text of the original play. She added new voices, re-interviewed many of the original characters, while I dove into the updated world of statistics, of income disparity and collected net worth. Because of its focused location, the original play contained few Hispanic or Latino voices. Asian Americans, and Native Americans too, were left out. In the editing process, Stephanie and I have attempted to create a more robust picture of the community, less grounded in location, and more in the polyphonic voices clamoring to be heard throughout the community. The Wealthy Street divide still features prominently, but it is only one aspect of an issue whose repercussions can be felt again and again throughout the city.
We also found a change in the performance structure was necessary to fit with the revitalized script. In staging, the first iteration of Lines was static, excerpts from different interviews woven together and presented in a hyper-realistic style that was designed to quickly differentiate characters. While the acting style, necessary for anyone trying to play 10-13 characters in the space of an hour and a half, is similar, we have altered the stage picture to accommodate for more choreographed, dynamic movement. This mirrors the differences in the text, its wider focus, its muscular variation between systematic injustices, and the increasing tension between rich and poor, between Caucasians and people of color.
This production of Lines brings a new energy in the form of musical experimentation as well. Though the first Lines also included a percussive soundscape, playing with Theo Ndawillie II of Vox Vidora and David Fuentes’ rhythms allowed for another angle to the actors’ physical expression. In performance the music gives a place other than the script to begin with, another surface to play off of and explore. Without speaking a single line, it supports the actors, lifts them up so that they can reach an entirely different level of competency.
We must be speaking with, not just speaking to. In hearing responses, we come to understand whether our words lead to resist, to transform, to move.
-Bell Hooks
In selecting what interviews to use for the new script, Stephanie and I were forced to cut a good deal of material that we thought was important, but unessential to the artistic whole of the work. What we have attempted to present here is a representative sample of race relations around the city. But there were many voices we were unable to include. Some have yet to be heard.
None of the voices represented here are intended to be authoritative. If there is a message in Lines, the first is that something is wrong. But the second is that pinpointing a solution is a matter of enormous complexity. The lines that we reveal here are limited, because race relations, systematic disenfranchisement, is both cultural and personal. They occur on both an individual and statistical level, and while both interact, they do not automatically confirm one another. Contradictions occur, are even welcome. No doubt audience members will leave with more questions than answers.
We encourage you to make those questions heard. Join the throng of voices onstage, and cropping up beside you. Only in this way can this production end with any real impact. Only by crossing over this first, insignificant line with the vulnerability of your own thoughts and positions can the rest be bent, broken or dissolved entirely.
You are where we find no lines.
On the Shoulders of Giants 