Kendra Craighead
Arts Editor
The staged reading of the book “Citizen: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine, directed by Shirley Jo Finney and performed by theater department students, ended its four days of performances Sunday.
The crescent shaped room’s black walls and rows of red seats surrounded the stage, where five white chairs filled the space in front of the Dailey Theatre’s projector screen where the word “CITIZEN” lit up the dark stage.
Students and faculty filtered into the theater filling half the space at roughly 50 attendees by the time the performance got underway.
The students on the stage were Mark Oliver, a sophomore theater major from Citrus College; Steven Forns, senior music major; Tia Kaufman, sophomore legal studies major; Zimanei Slocum, sophomore anthropology major and theater minor; and Jordan Nelson, freshman theater major.
The performers read from various sections of the book, delivering their lines with powerful voices fraught with emotion and a close-to-home feeling that immediately engaged the audience.
Rankine’s book explicitly deals with the experience of black people at the hands of a culture that belittles, mistreats, harms and executes them systematically. One example discusses the experience of Rankine when a cashier asks her if she thinks her credit card will work, even though she didn’t ask her white friend before her, but nothing is said.
The staged reading highlights the frustration and confusion of this moment and continues to do so with similar scenes for the rest of the performance.
After the show, the audience was invited to engage the performers in a discussion about the staged reading and the dilemma of racism in America.
The performers were asked what challenges they had to overcome when rehearsing the piece.
“For me it was getting past the anger and frustration with this piece and finding fear,” Oliver said.
The cast explained how they were able to get outside of their comfort zone for the reading.
“We did several exercises to develop character for this piece and one of them was to answer the question, ‘What is love,’” Kaufman said.
The performance also addressed the lives of black people who have been lost due to police violence. A list of names of people who have died as a result of police violence were displayed on the projector’s screen.
“Because white men can’t police their imagination, black people are dying,” Nelson said.
Cast and audience members discussed the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, and how society is willing to critique the method of protest but not the reason for the protest. The consensus seemed to be that victim blaming and silence in the face of discrimination are the biggest perpetrators of the problem.
Rankine will be on campus Wednesday to give a presentation on “Citizen: An American Lyric” for the One Book, One University event from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. in Morgan Auditorium.
Kendra Craighead can be reached at kendra.craighead@laverne.edu.
