The Shipment Explodes in Your Racial Comfort Zone

Mikeah Ernest Jennings, left, and Douglas Scott Streater, right, in Young Jean Lee's "The Shipment"

"This other company that I had worked with—you know that German cannibal story?" asked Mikeah Ernest Jennings. It was Tuesday afternoon, and we were sitting in Caffe Ladro in Lower Queen Anne, a stone's throw from On the Boards, where Jennings will be performing in Young Jean Lee's The Shipment starting tonight (through Sunday, tickets $24). His fellow cast-member, Prentice Onayemi, who I gathered had never heard this story, was sitting next to him, listening intently. Jennings was referring to the case of Armin Meiwes, who in 2001 solicited a man named Bernd Jurgen Brandes over the Internet to be a willing victim of cannibalism.

"It became the third act to one of their shows," he continued, "this big multimedia installation thing. So I became one of these characters, and we were performing the show at this theatre in Berlin. And after rehearsal of the show one night, we're out having drinks, and the director pulls me aside and is like, 'You know, the artistic director said the weirdest thing to me after watching the run.' And I was like, 'Well, what is that?' And he said, 'It all of a sudden clicked in to him that you were the one being eaten.'" Jennings paused. "And the artistic director had pulled our director aside, and said that the audience might not be able to understand what's going on..."

Jennings trailed off into a pregnant silence, so I finished for him: "Because you're black."

Jennings, who was recounting the story with a quizzical look somewhere between amusement and disgust, sort of half shrugged and nodded. "Because I should be the larger, aggressive one, consuming." Onayemi just shook his head and muttered a flabbergasted "Damn."

If there's any story that gets to the crux of what's at stake in Young Jean Lee's The Shipment, which may be the most important and challenging show playing in Seattle this season, this was it. Most theatre about race, like most conversations about race, is safe and tepid and more often than not lets us not have a real conversation. The Shipment flies in the face of all of that. It plunges deep into the complex web of social constructions, stereotypes, and biases that inform race in contemporary American society, and it's been winning accolades as it tours nationally and internationally for the innovative way it's approached one of the central issues our nation faces.

Three years ago or so, Young Jean Lee, a Brooklyn-based (but Pullman-born) Korean-American playwright and director, rebelled against the standard strictures the theatre places on identity plays. Having already crafted a work about Asian-Americans, Lee found a group of willing African-American collaborators and workshopped out a play that places the most subtle and ingrained forms of contemporary racial stereotypes and biases at the forefront.

Mikeah Ernest Jennings, a native of Lake Los Angeles in the rural Mojave desert, who started as a dancer and sports a remarkable shock of hair, has been with the show the longest. Of the cast of five, he's the only one still with it after the initial 2008 workshop performance. Prentice Onayemi grew up in Chicago, where he started as singer, performing opera as a child, before moving on to acting in college. He joined the cast of The Shipment about a year ago, when the show was being re-worked for its New York premier, and when discussing the racial issues that lie at its center, he speaks with the sonorous tone of a college professor who's been giving the same lecture for years.

"It's honestly very emotional," Jennings said of the play, in comparison to most other theatre about race. "The emotions aren't a guise, they aren't slapped on after all the political questions have been answered by the creation of this situation, to create this conflict in a political way, so we can talk about a political question. This show is actually coming out of a gut feeling, for Young Jean, for the rest of the performers, so what I think people respond to in the audience is really that they can't slip outside of the grasp of it, of either their political agreement or dissension to the message. It's very emotional, it's not an 'answer' show."

That stands in marked contrast to vast majority of American theatre about blacks (and most of it is about, not for). The theatre prides itself on being open and progressive, but as Jennings' anecdote about the German artistic director points out, in many ways it's deeply conservative when it comes to race. There's a tried and true formula for African-American plays to make it on Broadway and the mainstream theatre, and it's exemplified by August Wilson. Whatever else his achievement in excavating the African-American experience of the 20th century, his shows all take place in the past, letting the audience off the hook by giving them room to consider how far we've come rather than ask how we far we haven't. Preferably, racism should be of the overt and pernicious kind, leaving no moral ambiguity as to who's bad and who's good. And finally the characters should be essentially decent people whose personal problems can be attributed directly to said overt racism, to provide a teachable moment at the end.

Nowhere was that more in evidence than in Barack Obama's brief vacation to New York to catch a performance of Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone on Broadway. The contrast of the first African-American president sitting in the audience of the show was pure pageantry, reinforcing the title's promise that the age of the legendary chain-gang man Joe Turner was over, the last nail in his coffin driven home by the age of Obama, all the while obscuring the title's actual connotation, that Turner's legacy remains with us.

"When you look back to when Barack Obama was on the verge of becoming president," said Onayemi, "and you take the barometer of the amount of fear that there was in this country, like the number of people who were saying, 'If Barack Obama doesn't get elected, then I'm moving to Canada,' or the people who are saying, 'If Barack Obama does get elected, then I'm moving to Canada'...we don't live in some sort of post-racial world! That's not the reality."

"My girlfriend's grandmother said there was no way she was going to vote for Barack Obama," he continued, "because she couldn't stand the idea of having a black man tell her what to do."

Did she tell him that herself?, I asked. "No, she didn't tell me!" he exclaimed, laughing darkly.

Prentice Onayemi in "The Shipment"

It's this complexity and subtlety of race that Lee's fragmentary play explores. The play unfolds in segments. It opens with a dance number then launches into a stand-up comic's monologue, echoing the moral and ethical conundrums faced by edgy black comedians whose acerbic racial commentary finds favor with white audiences. Then the play lurches into a reductio ad absurdum life-story of a rapper, before veering off to another musical number, and finally ending with a naturalistic drama about a cocktail party that's as long as the other segments combined.

"Most of the time, when any creative product involves a black person, stereotypes of some way, shape, or form are part of the conversation," Onayemi said. "And in this show, it's at the forefront of it. But the phenomenal thing is that Young Jean comes at it with the noblest of intentions, and she's interested in dissecting these stereotypes and getting at all the layers and nuances, and then she asked us the question of, how do we feel about these things?"

"Nothing accidental happens in the show," added Jennings. "On the performance side, there is nothing that we do that is an accident. It's not the sort of traditional acting performance, where through the entirety of the performance you're sort of 'in the moment' and anything can happen. A lot of it is technical, most of it is extremely specific, it's a very tightly tailored presentation."

There's something vaguely Brechtian about the play—or at least parts of it. It's not a narrative that invites the audience or the performers in, but rather keeps them at the distance, pushing them back every time it seems to seduce them. It is funny, but the performers don't give you pauses for laughs, grasping that humor is both anarchic and deeply conservative at the same time. They make you think, in other words, about why you're laughing.

Take for instance the story of the rapper, Omar. It's so skeletal that it unfolds like a comic burlesque of an episode of Behind the Music. Omar wants to be a rapper to express himself, but he has no money so he turns to drug dealing, winds up in jail, gets credibility, lands a record contract, then burns out on a life of nihilistic abandonment. There's no effort to color the process of getting from one moment to the next. Conversations unfold perfunctorily. For instance, this is the process that gets Omar to deal drugs:

DESMOND: I’m going to rob people and shoot them and also sell drugs. You should do it too.

OMAR: But I don’t want to be a drug dealer. I want to win this rap competition and get a recording contract.

DESMOND: But how are you going to get to the rap competition? You don’t have a car or even money to buy bus fare.

OMAR: That’s a good point.

It's so brief that it reads as a comic riff on the cliche, but at the same time, it's only a cliche because it's such a well-known trajectory. Onayemi and Jennings assured me that not a moment of Omar's life is played for laughs.

"It's ridiculous, and it's silly, but part of it still cleaves to the idea that these are real people's stories, that we are not making fun of this story, that as cliched as this sort of story may feel in a pop culture presentation, in a mass consumption sort of way, this is someone's story right now, every day, and we're doing nothing to mock that or ridicule that," Jennings explained. "So for us, it's not about indulging the audience's desire to laugh at the ridiculousness of the stereotype, there's more a dissonance being created in the audience, in the audience's response to itself. So that, as they're watching this thing they think they're enjoying, it's running away with them."

An important part of that effect was the actors' approach to characterization. "I think the eventual direction from Young Jean Lee was that we should wear our characters like paper doll outfits," said Onayemi, "where just the tabs fold into the collar. So we don't fully inhabit the characters. There's a plastic, or highly stylized, quality to all the action onstage, so that the stereotypes can't be consumed as they would be in Tyler Perry films, but instead, as an audience member, you're sitting there and saying, 'Okay, I understand it.' There's this familiar story that's coming across, because it's the story of the kid who wants to be a rapper, there's a drug dealer involved, there's all these stereotypical characters, but there's a sense of distance that's created. A separation or...I guess, a lack of comfort that's fostered by the fact that we don't fully inhabit the characters and our performance is so exaggerated."

"How they're consuming us is, I think, the highlight of that first section," added Jennings.

One of the most compelling things about the show, for me, is that it so consciously transgresses racial boundaries. The idea of a Korean-American tackling a show like this is an impressive sign of how willing Lee is to take risks. Racial or ethnic experience is typically treated like something that's owned and exclusive—essentially, that you have to be, say, black in order to represent the African-American experience. There's both a good reason to think that way, while at the same time, the complete exclusivity of experience tends to reinforce the idea that we, as a society, can't talk about certain things. And on the count, The Shipment cuts both ways, challenging both the white (or perhaps better, "non-black") audience's racial biases while at the same pushing the buttons of black audience members.

"I had a co-worker who was very offended" by the show, Jennings told me. "This woman, she is very educated, ambitious, she has three sons she's raising...in her own words, she's a very strong black woman, and represents herself as such. And she was very excited to come and see the show, and after she saw the show, she sort of approached my desk, and said...well, there was a line in the text that she cited specifically...It's when the stand-up comedian says at one point that he used to run on railroad tracks. That line always sticks in my side...It just makes me feel uncomfortable. And she's like, 'I don't like that.' And I said, 'Okay, well let's talk about it. What don't you like?' And she's like, 'Well, a lot of young African-American men engage in high risk behavior because they feel unwanted, so I didn't think that was okay.'"

"That line wasn't in there as an accident," Jennings stated. "And she was sort of like, 'Well, I don't like it.' And the feeling that I got from her as she pulled apart the show for me at my desk was that, I think what she didn't like was that Young Jean wasn't black. I think the show struck a lot of really important points for her, but what she didn't like was that anyone else had anything to do with it. It was too exposing for her. It was like taking your family business outside; you don't talk about stuff outside the house."

"The vast majority of black people that comes to the show really enjoys it, because we're expressing some things intelligently that they wish they would have or could have expressed at some point in their lives," Onayemi added. "But because of the fact that the theatre-going public is predominately white, no matter where you go, black people on the whole have more conservative notions of what theatre is. And so, whereas with the white audience, we push their perceptions of race, in many cases—like this issue with this co-worker—what that gets at is that with many black audience members, we push their perceptions of what theatre, performance, art is."

And that desire not to talk is, of course, the real barrier that needs to be broken down. As Onayemi suggested towards the end of our interview, the idea that more "education" will solve our problems is a dodge. Education is good, of course, but August Wilson educates. What we need to do more of is to talk, to break down the wall of silence that determines what is and is not okay to express about race, and The Shipment is almost precision engineered to force that on the audience by causing them to acknowledge their own assumptions, which is deeply uncomfortable. But as Onayemi summed it up: "Nothing bad will come from people trying to understand one another better."