White and nonwhite audience members haven’t. Awards and honors.
And so I'm really grateful that the seriousness of the prize has extended people's patience for something that can be uncomfortable in parts.I grew up as a theater dork who memorized all the lyrics to I have no idea. “I’ve never thought about the power that white people have to create a space and then to expect people of other races to exist in that space comfortably,” she said.In This Play About Race, ‘People Need to Be Uncomfortable’The playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, right, with the actress MaYaa Boateng, at Soho Rep, where “Fairview” is being staged. Reviews 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner Fairview Gets a Second Showing Nothing is as it seems in Jackie Sibblies Drury's extraordinary new play. White audience members and audience members who don’t identify as white have enjoyed it.
Sure. “Fairview” seems like the kind of play that would offer talkbacks, but Soho Rep just underwent a pricey renovation to bring it up to code, and talkbacks require more resources. In April 2019, Fairview won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The playwright and director of Fairview reveal their thoughts on this unpredictable and critically acclaimed play. And so we started from a place of trying to create what in the theater felt like a normal black family, and then introducing the idea of someone watching that family — and that watching [changes] their behavior and the course of their lives. Julieta Cervantes/Soho Rep Yeah, I don't know! The play's run was extended from June 30 to July 28. "And there was something about the surveillance being embodied — like, you could see a dude wearing a sweater walking behind you — that it just felt more low-tech and in-person than I was used to thinking about surveillance," Sibblies Drury says. Divide the audience figuratively? But “Fairview” is different. Julieta Cervantes/Soho Rep Which is nice, because we've tried to create an experience that's a 90-minute-long experience, and so it really only makes sense if you're able to sit through the whole thing. And that's not something that we always allow our critics to do.
“A lot of people who have been upset by it have also intellectually engaged with it and I don’t know that being upset is wrong,” she said.Reactions vary widely not only from one performance to another but also within the same performance, which can be jarring. Neither had anyone else in the room. "The set was designed by Mimi Lien, who is incredible. It rips up that social contract, suggesting that spectatorship might not always be innocent or passive or nice. Some say the play goes too far, and others say it doesn’t go far enough. And so I feel like a lot of really interesting pieces were written in response to the play, which I find gratifying ... because the play tries to point to whiteness not as the norm, or not as invisible, but as a particular vantage that that can be damaging to other races. We'll see. And so that really was the impetus, at least for me. And then I think that some people also leave because sometimes characters in the play say things that they find offensive, and rather than sitting and asking themselves why the characters are saying things that are offensive, they are simply offended, shut down and leave. Just thinking about different black people of means and the ways that that can be expressed in a very particular ... "showroom," trying-to-have-everything-be-a-little-bit-perfect kind of a way.And I think that we were all really interested in that because eventually over the course of the play — and I don't want to spoil anything, but — other people start to project their own versions of blackness onto these characters. There have been complaints — on Twitter, on That’s O.K. And so we were really excited to have them feel kind of perfect — but in a way where there was also a sense of dread of what was going to happen to them to make them not perfect.There was something that was so interesting about a lot of the criticism — that it felt very subjective. And that to me has been really deeply exciting as a human and as an artist.Different people have left for really, really different reasons, I think. They’d both enjoyed the play, both been moved by it, both found it very funny. She had never done a play like this. And it's just very thorough in its aggressiveness.