Tanya Barfield: A Meditation on "Blackness"

About the author:
Tanya Barfield began her theatrical career as a performer, appearing in her own one-woman show Without Skin, or Breathlessness. For reasons she describes below, Barfield decided to turn her talent to writing, graduating from Juilliard's Playwriting Program and receiving the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award. Since then, her plays—including Dent, The Quick, 121° West, Pecan Tan and The Houdini Act—have been produced in theaters around the country and at London's Royal Court. Barfield's latest work, Blue Door, now at Playwrights Horizons, is described as no less than an exploration of the black American male experience. When a prominent African-American mathematician in crisis begins to lose his grip on reality, the ghosts of his ancestors break the silence of his insomnia-filled night. In Blue Door, Barfield aims to present characters who look like and sound like the people she grew up with—and give theatergoers a better-rounded picture of African-American life.

Before becoming a playwright, I was an actor. This was pre-Waiting to Exhale, and I was submitted for a myriad of prostitutes and drug addicts. I was never completely convincing in either role, although my depiction of a drug addict was worlds better than the prostitutes. I remember one time, sandwiched between hip-hop auditions, I went in for a household paper product commercial. I even got a callback. But then the producer asked me to bring "a little more of 'the hood'" to my acting. Try as I might, I just couldn't manage to make the line "This toilet paper is so soft" as bland as it is sound inner-city. Of course, the desire to change the writer's lines never gets an actor far. As could be imagined, my acting career was rather short-lived. So I moved on to playwriting.

A few years ago, I wrote a children's musical about a boy who escapes from slavery. At first I was surprised that several young actors refused to audition—or even to read the script. "I won't play a slave" was the reason. I was discouraged, to say the least. It goes without saying that one would not want to play a one-dimensional stereotype. But why refuse to play a heroic, intelligent boy who joins the Union Army? "Black people are just tired of playing slaves and maids" was the answer. In a way, I understood. Being light-skinned, I got tired of "tragic mulatto" roles, too.

Yet I couldn't help but wonder if the refusal to even read the script was more than just an act of protest. Wasn't it also about shame? Today it seems the legacy of African-American identity is often rejected by the predominant feeling that being a descendant of a slave is shameful—yet being a misogynistic rap artist idealizing violence is not. "Forget writing about the past. Write about now," some may argue. I call this "cultural amnesia," which has not been foisted on us entirely by whites, but by our own internalized racism.

Secretly, I can't help asking myself: Am I stuck in the past? Shouldn't theater be about "now"? Isn't it incumbent upon the present to be a rejection of the past? Yet as I look around at the current portrayals of black people in the entertainment industry, I don't see many people I know. Instead, I see new stereotypes and endless depictions of ghetto culture. In reality, a vast number of African-Americans are part of an underrepresented group: We're middle-class. I look at my own family and personal community and see that we were a bunch of smart people—rarely central characters on the American stage not to mention the screen. And when we are on stage, it is often not to play a black character; it is to fulfill a noble act of colorblind casting, to play a Shakespearean character. Incidentally, I'm a big fan of the Bard.

So I set about writing Blue Door, a play about both the past and present. I thought about the many issues facing non-ghetto blacks and eventually honed in on the complicated problem of success and assimilation. The play is about a new glass ceiling. It is about what part of the self a person carves away to get ahead. It is about a black mathematician's entanglement with his past. It is one man's insomniatic journey through the dark night of his soul. Ultimately, I see Blue Door as a theatrical meditation on "blackness"—a dialogue between then and now, between cultural amnesia and memory. I believe it's a universal story: Is my present determined by my familial past?

I once pitched a show to a TV studio. I was flatly rejected. The message I was given went as follows: "These days, nobody's going to watch a family drama about a successful black person. Viewers just won't tune in." Here's my next pitch: I hope theatergoers will respond differently.