Shadow and flesh

Today's play was Two Trains Running, by August Wilson: six men and one woman interweave their voices in Black American English. It's 1969 in a small restaurant in a black community in Pittsburgh. Justice is blind, a ham promised is never delivered, black men are arrested for the crime of being black, gentrification is destroying an old community, a black woman scars her legs so that men will look at her as something more than legs and ass, and despite the presence of possible disaster, there is, at the end, love, hope, and transcendence...for the moment. There are strong shadows cast against the future. Malcolm X is dead and more suffering is on the way, but there are moments of deep connection, moments when old friends hear and understand each other and young men who might be expected to shoot each other stand together against the stresses of white power. The acting is superb, the script a tapestry of poetic voices punctuated by laughter that holds back tears. The play is more conversation than action, and the conversation is rhythmic and beautiful. It's a very good play to see, and the production does it justice.

It's a play written by an African-American, performed by African-Americans for, in this case, a white audience. (There may have been some people of color among the six hundred plus people in the audience, but I didn't see them.) There were moments of inappropriate laughter, moments when the audience missed the point. It's a play that tells a piece of the bloody history of being black in the USA, and being white in a sea of white faces watching the play, I felt complicit in consumption of a story that is more than a story, more than an entertainment. It matters to feel this. It matters for black actors to have work that reflects the life and language of black community, and for white audiences to see Wilson's work, for whites to be outsiders, hearing the poetry of Black English spoken by people who get the cadences right. The story matters, the language matters, in ways that merely entertaining shows don't matter.

After the show, we walked back to the cottage through the warm and sunny afternoon, the guys in their bermuda shorts and I in white linen. It was a summery afternoon,  and we sat out on the deck by the stream to talk. Shadows slanted across us, casting bars of light and darkness across the interwoven legs of my good friends.

I have taken some shots of the town, the scenery, the farmer's market, the streaming river of white people gathering outside the theatres. I'll post some of those later, when I get back to Portland and have more time to catch up and to post pictures on the other place. But for now, these interwoven legs and shadows feel right to me as a picture of the day.