Sitting center in the last filled row of chairs in the SoHo Theatre, I recognized a comfort in the audience which I was apart of. I waited for the houselights to dim, for Flesh and Bone to begin, aware of the relaxed postures of privilege. A tone of anticipation carried through pretentious small talk practiced in higher education. Hearing accents which matched my own, I understood the financial freedom which allowed these vacationers to attend the theater on their summers abroad. My gut shifted as I participated in our ironic attendance. We paid to be here, to enjoy entertainment advertising a plot which portrays the underserved and marginalized whom we cannot sympathize when presented only by social class.
I pictured the jailbird tangerine advertisement of this play which I passed when entering the playhouse. A clustered overlapping of the characters suggests their shared circumstances, just as the organized rows of seats suggested the audience’s. However, the circumstances the audience shared are undeniably different than those the characters share. In the poster, the characters are not photographed, but illustrated as caricatures of impoverished aggression. Brows scrunched with unclean hands lifted in fists or gesturing violence or holding cocktails of destruction. The poster presents the characters as an active, offensive threat to societal norms. With nothing else known of the play, we, the audience, share a stigmatized expectation of the stereotypes this poster promised us, how these characters would be portrayed. We expected further reinforcement for the taught perceptions of who are the lower class. Each of us, having afforded our seats, shared— even if just subconsciously— these expectations and removedness.
When Terrance, played by the playwright Elliot Warren, finally took centerstage alone, we, the collective audience, sat opposite him. We stared, outnumbering him plenty to one. To us, he was not yet a character, but a removed concept to be defined. We waited for our expectations to be fulfilled like the proceeding entertainments which introduced us to these detailed stereotypes. His dingy-grey wife beater costume suggested his promised lower class position. Our own clothes contrastingly clean and presentable. He faced us as we faced him, it was like a glass wall separated us. He is our contrasting “other.” Our preexisting perceptions kept him at a removed distance.
Terrance’s broken mannerisms do not immediately deny stereotypes of the aggressive and unlearned poor. However, as he looked toward the audience, his gaze did not observe the empty space above us. His eye contact addressed not the group, but each of us individually. His eye twitched, his mouth scowled, but he did not attack. He was angry, furious even, and the shifting gaze suggested it was at each of us personally. A hungry awareness pulsed through the vein in his neck that we were his “other” and that we sat across from him. We were seemingly to blame. There was no hiding in the rows of seats in the small SoHo Theatre, or awkwardly leaving to wash your hands once the house lights went black. We were a captive audience, unforced to be there, yet expected to stay and watch the production we paid to portray for us “how the other half lives.”
Terrance opened his mouth. His voice slipped through his first exclamation: “What a piece of work is a man.” Each syllable was emphasized with equal weight. His tone mimicked his furious composure. Spit sprayed from his lips. His eye twitched again, again. A refusal to divert his gaze from the privileged audience cracked the fourth wall. Yes, he was trying to break through our protecting glass stereotypes. He, as a character, a playwright, an actor, a man was very much aware of his audience.
The allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet conflicts with our stigma assigned to the lower class. His delivery suggested an education through his reference to the arts. His allusion draws connection to a prince of luxury and power which fails to characterize himself. Yet questions the reason for how human treats human. By presenting his audience with obtained knowledge assumed to be inaccessible to the poor, the man in rags demanded the audience consider what truly differs between him and us other than materiality. Although he is yelling and angry, we understand that as an audience we are safe.
Stereotypes are not inherent, but learned from the arts. Despite the responsibility the arts have to represent, stereotypes often take precedent over accuracy because stereotypes sell. Stereotypes were what sold the seats we occupied in the SoHo Theatre on the 3rd of July. By advertising stereotypes, an audience of privilege feels invited. An audience who typically maintains separation from those they have been taught to view as “others” can interact in a setting which appears unthreatening and reinforces their position of privilege. However, regardless of the means of selling, works are responsible to deconstruct the expected in order to destigmatize assumptions of differences between humans. Works, like Flesh & Bone, which accept their responsibility as art are only successful by playing with the presumed stereotypes in ways which conflict with the audience’s expectations and challenge audience comfort.
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