Enacting difference: Marita Bonner's 'Purple Flower' and the ambiguities of race

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Allison Berg, Merideth Taylor

But as our discussions of the play as text turned to a consideration of how we would realize the play in performance, and students struggled to find ways of concretizing Bonner's abstractions, they had to make explicit the reasons that they interpreted moments of the play as they did, and this sometimes involved sharing anecdotes and analogies from experiences closer to home. As instructors we were committed to a collaborative process that would encourage negotiated meanings, but more often than not it was impossible to reach consensus. Because student discussions of the relationships among race, entitlement, and power revealed such different experiences and assumptions, they were reluctant to present the play in either of the two ways its critics have interpreted it: as a "morality play" whose characters "resonate as Everyman and Everywoman" (Flynn 224) or as a revolutionary drama advocating "racial confrontation" (Harris 217). The question then became how they could maintain the play's ambiguity in performance, making both racially specific and racially non-specific interpretations available to their audience.

Though time and budget constraints ruled out the possibility of doing a fully mounted production of the play, we wanted our performance to include at least some elements of characterization, staged action, and spectacle. To this end, we asked students to agree on practical decisions related to three major questions: (1) How should we cast the play? (2) What are the crucial elements of the setting and how should we indicate them for the audience? And (3) to what extent should we physicalize the characters?

Casting. In considering the first question, students had to decide whether the collectivity implied by Bonner's use of the term Us's was a specifically racial identification or could describe any group of people united through oppression and struggle. Practically speaking, should only African American students play Us's and only white students play White Devils? We asked students to consider the larger implications of casting in terms of current debates among theater practitioners and theorists, prefacing our class discussion of this issue with a brief presentation on current casting practices as well as philosophical debates regarding traditional and non-traditional casting. We introduced the concepts of "color-blind" casting and race-specific casting in order to engage the question of if, and how, race mattered in the theater. Though our own options were governed to a large extent by the demographics of our group (there were not enough African American students to cover all the "Us" roles, for example), we felt that it was important for students to consider the implications of casting decisions.

We wanted, especially, to contextualize the issue in terms of the historically exploitative tradition of black representation in the theater and in terms of the current debate between exponents of the "race-doesn't-and-shouldn't-matter" and the "race (and gender)always-matter" schools of thought. Though this presentation was brief and necessarily generalized, students were introduced to the idea that, in the theater, responsibility for artistic decisions is conjoined with responsibility for the political implications of such decisions. The complexities of the contemporary debate about casting, combined with the inherent ambiguities in the script and students' varying interpretations of it, made this the most protracted and murky, yet possibly most fruitful, discussion. Our casting decisions were complicated by the very different forms of participation called for in the parts of the White Devils and the Us's, the White Devils having no lines (and thus depending on movement) and the Us's having reading duties that would limit movement.