Where We Stand—written by Donnetta Lavinia Grays and performed as a solo show, with the author and David Ryan Smith rotating performances—is presented as a townhall meeting. But not as anything like the townhall meetings held by the hundreds during these election-year days, weeks and seemingly endless months.
This one, at the Women’s Project WP Theater, begins with Grays (as “Man,” which the program makes clear) near the back of the audience. She starts to sings a brief melody, repeats it several times, eventually adding a lyric: “We all come back around to the end of the street, then come back around, them come back around.”
She carries on like this for many minutes. Okay, perhaps she doesn’t intone for that many minutes. Perhaps it only seem as if she does. Whatever, she goes over that tuneful ground enough for some patrons to join her initially on the notes and then on the words. Quickly, more and more patrons chime in.
Encouraging the response, Grays proceeds to the almost empty stage, and begins chatting about what feel like modes of self-help. Among them, if I remember correctly, is the imprecation, “I want to be free.” She’s not speaking only for herself—or for himself, if she’s really meant to be Man throughout. She’s speaking on behalf of everyone in the audience.
And sure as God made little green apples, a goodly number of ticket-buyers-turned-townhall-meeting-attendees chant along with her. They do the same for other statements she makes, as well as clap along slap-happily. They’re all definitely behind her belief in “peace” and “passion.” Who wouldn’t be?
Yes, the energetic, voluble Grays seems intent on promoting Norman Vincent Peale-like positive thinking (aren’t just about any self-help gatherings out for the same goal?). To confirm her point(s) she brings up as many objections to thinking positively as could be lodged by negative thinkers. The aim, of course, is to dismiss them, which she does without exception.
She continues in this vein for just about an hour, wandering across the stage and back. At one moment she pulls over a three-foot-square (or so) riser and stands on that. She puts a high-back chair on it and stands on that for a while before sitting on it.
It may be that Grays, directed by Tamilla Woodard, has goals more trenchant more in mind to accomplish. Believe me, she sure gets somewhere when she sings with such a robust voice. But if she does have significant ground to break, I can’t relay what it is.
Maybe I missed a significant piece of information. For after all the perorating she indulges in, she precipitously asks members of the audience to read charges handed out that are made against the Man she’s been portraying. Then she asks for a show of hands to determine, as she sits humbled on stage, whether Man should or shouldn’t be absolved of his transgressions.
In the current political climate, a whiff of the recent impeachment hearings unexpectedly permeates the Where We Stand air. Somehow, though, that’s misleading. Grays has to have written the piece before the drama of the last few weeks. She can’t be asking audience members to be absolving the current oval office occupant in absentia, can she?
Full disclosure: As a reviewer, I excuse myself from audience participation. It’s something of a fake excuse, since I don’t like participatory—often called “immersive”—theater, no matter what the circumstances. So call me curmudgeon, but I did none of the singing, clapping and voting.
In time I began to be particularly pleased I didn’t. That’s because as Grays continued her oration, I started to have a queasy feeling. Indeed, if I did miss a crucial aspect of what she was saying, it was likely because I was becoming more vividly aware of what she was accomplishing.
To be clear, I don’t believe she was plotting this result deliberately, but there was a quality to the spell-like conditions that made me conscious of what charismatic leaders, like Grays, are capable of achieving. I suddenly had the notion that she had manipulated the audience so proficiently with her Pied-Piper-of-Hamlin manner that had she suddenly demanded “Lock her up,” the spectators might have complied without too much resistance.
In other words, I may not have gotten Grays’ deliberate purpose, but I was starting to be disturbed by an unintended effect she was having on ticket buyers as potentially docile figures to be misled. In these parlous times, this is decidedly not where we want to stand.
Where We Stand opened February 11, 2020, at the WP Theater and runs through March 1. Tickets and information: wptheater.org
