An Uncomfortable Audience at Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview” by Ruby Hutson-Ellenberg

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-prize winning play “Fairview” shines a light on white spaces

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-prize winning play “Fairview” will run until Aug 11, 2019 at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center after a successful production at Soho Repertory Theatre in 2018.

The 95-minute play may technically be one act with no intermission, but it is divided into four distinct plots that pull the audience in quickly and easily, getting them invested in the outcome of a story line before switching the rules of the world existing on stage and propelling them into a new reality.

Plot one shows an average American family, the Frasiers, preparing a birthday dinner for their matriarch. Along the way, it presents some relatable problems: two sisters, Beverly and Jasmine, who can’t stand one another. A husband, Dayton, who can’t tell the difference between a dessert spoon and a serving spoon. A teenage daughter, Keisha, who struggles with the simultaneous excitement and fear about her future in college. And the one thing they can all bond over: teasing the grandmother.

Plot two mutes the players on stage as they recreate the movements from the previous plot, as a conversation among an unseen group of people plays over them. The topic of choice? If these talkers could choose their race, what would they choose. This leads to an almost unbelievably problematic conversation, so ignorant and racist it that elicits gasps from the audience. Eventually, we realize the unseen group is, like that evening’s audience, watching the story of the Frasiers on stage. That realization immediately elicits discomfort because it creates a distinct connection between theatergoers and this unseen group of talkers: we are all the audience.

In plot three, the unseen group of talkers take the stage and the audience learns, for certain, they are all white. They have decided to test their theoretical discussion by standing in for the rest of the Frasier’s family and friends as the dinner continues. However, Keisha is the only one who notices the newcomers are not her family or friends, but rather strangers. Strangers who do not try to embody the true characters of the persons they’ve taken over, but instead act out horrible stereotypes, which they force the rest of the Frasier family to interact with. As the scene goes on, the stand-ins cause emotional destruction, making up lies about the original characters, eroding the true story of the Frasier family with plot lines they find more fitting. Their disruption builds until it breaks into a physical food fight with the stand-ins hurling things at one another, knocking things off shelves, and blasting confetti, literally ruining the initially pristine home and the family gathering.

The story laid out in plot one will have no ending. The audience will never know if the grandmother is happy with her party, or if Keisha gains some autonomy from her mother, or if Beverly and Jasmine have some kind of reconciliation. The trajectory of the story has been halted by the presence of these white stand-ins. And perhaps also by the presence of the audience, which is, as is typical at a New York theater, mostly white. Once again, an uncomfortable connection between the theatergoers and the stand-ins is forged.

Drury disrupts New York theater’s normally white space in plot four, when Keisha breaks the fourth wall and singles out white theatergoers, asking them to switch places with her, and go on stage so she can sit in the audience with other people of color. She specifies her motivation: until the roles are reversed, she cannot tell a true story.