Playwright Dael Orlandersmith airs the dirty laundry of internal racism in ‘Yellowman’ at McCarter Theatre.
By: Susan Van Dongen
Hatred rarely comes in black and white. The distrust and alienation that fuels animosity comes in subtle gradations of every shade on the color bar from chocolate brown to umber to lily white.
Playwright Dael Orlandersmith is particularly knowledgeable about certain issues that exist around the color yellow. She has recently written about the tortures of being light-skinned African-American or "high-yella," recalling kids’ teasing language.
The result is Yellowman, a new play written by and starring Ms. Orlandersmith and directed by Blanka Zizka, which premieres in Princeton Jan. 10 at McCarter Theatre’s Second Stage OnStage and runs through Jan. 27.
Taking a break from a hectic post-Christmas rehearsal, the writer/actress speaks about society’s complex ideal of beauty. She reflects on the contortions Caucasian women go through trying to live up to these ideals, from nose jobs to having the hairdresser and colorist on speed dial.
"As inane as it sounds, there is something racial beneath that," Ms. Orlandersmith. "If this standard of beauty causes so much antagonism in the white community, can you imagine what it does to people of color?
"In terms of the play, I wanted to explore the rift between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned blacks and how each side has tortured the other. On both sides there are rumblings of self-hatred."
Yellowman employs Ms. Orlandersmith’s poetic style of writing to tell the tale of young Eugene and Alma, two soul mates growing up in South Carolina in the mid-1960s. The children play together happily until society intervenes. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Alma and Eugene share the purity of friendship until their differences are revealed Alma is a dark-skinned African-American and Eugene is light-skinned, or "yellow."
Although stressing that Yellowman is not an autobiographical play, Ms. Orlandersmith, who grew up in Harlem and the South Bronx, remembers summers spent in South Carolina where she became aware of color issues in a new way.
"It’s loosely based on my observations," she says. "I’ve experienced internal racism and I’ve used certain aspects of this. I remember when I was a kid, hanging out with my cousins in the South and one older cousin was making fun of another who was darker-skinned. I was only about seven, and I laughed along with it. But when I grew up and thought about it, I said ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that.’ "
Yellowman takes a look at how racism can exist within families as well as races. A careful reading of the play reveals layers of meaning, releasing revelations of twisted familial sins that have been passed down like legacies through the generations. Mostly, Ms. Orlandersmith’s play exposes a world where nothing is as insurmountable as skin color.
The playwright talks about the roots of this interracial rivalry, which go back to pre-Civil War slavery days when full-bodied dark-skinned women worked the fields, while the lighter-skinned women would tend the house and sometimes the master of the house. The character Odelia, Alma’s mother, represents the archetype of the darker-skinned laborer.
"If the master took a light-skinned woman as a mistress and they had a child, and if their offspring was white enough, the master would send them to the North or to Europe to be educated," Ms. Orlandersmith says, explaining that any progeny of the master would be offered socio-economic advantages the field workers’ children would never enjoy. "That’s one of the things that caused the rift between light and darker-skinned people." (For further reference, she recommends the 1992 book The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African-Americans (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich).
Ms. Orlandersmith won an OBIE (Off-Broadway) Award for Beauty’s Daughter, which she wrote and starred in at American Place Theatre. A prolific poet as well as playwright, Ms. Orlandersmith toured extensively with the Nuyorican Poets Café.
Ms. Orlandersmith began work on Yellowman in 1999 at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory in Utah, part of the famed institute founded by Robert Redford. Ms. Orlandersmith and director Blanka Zizka have worked on Yellowman for two years, culminating in another two-week Sundance workshop in July 2001. After its January run at McCarter, the play will travel to the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Ms. Zizka is artistic director.
Ms. Orlandersmith says because Yellowman raises racial issues, people might come looking for answers and justice. She hopes, instead, they’ll come to hear a good story.
"Yellowman is ‘a’ story but not ‘the’ story. I don’t attempt to speak for an entire sex or an entire race," she says.
Ms. Orlandersmith names some of the theater’s great storytellers as influences and identifies with their ability to touch on some of humanity’s more difficult psychological issues, things we often try to bury.
"People might get mad at me for writing about this issue, but that’s because it’s still because it’s alive and kicking," she says. "Some people are going to feel I’m exposing ‘dirty laundry,’ and maybe to some extent I am, but this is a story that needs to be told, and that’s liberating in itself.
"I’m interested in the darker side of human nature. Writers like Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Sam Shepard give us permission to feel uncomfortable, because that’s part of the human condition. But when (an issue) is thrust in our faces, we’re forced to look at it, think about it and hopefully act upon it. That’s what I want to do."
Yellowman, written by and starring Dael Orlandersmith and directed by Blanka Zizka, is at McCarter Theatre’s Second Stage OnStage, 91 University Place, Princeton, Jan. 10-27. Tickets cost $20. For information, call (609) 258-2787. On the Web: www.mccarter.org