310 Blog Post 1

To this day I am still, and will probably always be, constantly amazed at how literature and current events seem predestined to occur simultaneously, as if by some divine or cosmic design. They inform and document each other in a partnership that is both valuable and destructive to the rest of us sitting and watching.

            While I sat captivated by Elliot Warren’s Flesh and Bone at the Soho Theatre, I felt the range of emotions from pain to love to joy to anger, and others I can’t quite put a name to. And all that time I couldn’t help feeling reminded when given a brief split-second between scenes to gather myself that a large part of why Warren’s play was so evocative was the very real global, sociopolitical context we’re living in. I read news like I drink water, so it’s often on my mind somewhere if even in the background relaxing until something brings it forward. The struggle of the working class is not necessarily news, not a new concept for society, but the surrounding elements Warren brings, quite literally, into the light as well as the running metaphor likening the characters’ physical location with their personal characteristics are what help make the play all the more relevant and poignant.

 “Down in the gutter, deep down what where people don’t like to talk about that’s where I reside” Terrence says in his opening monologue, and the rest of the play makes it increasingly clear that he isn’t just talking about his address. Every single person in the cast lays out their dark secrets, nasty habits, and dirty desires for the world to criticize, and use as fodder against them later when making the argument that lower class people don’t deserve the same respects and dignities because of who they are and how they live. The rest of that opening scene continues with this double meaning, most figuratively when Jamal describes their area in East London as “a rotten shitstorm of concrete housing, no signs of architectural design, just bricks and mortar that rise high.” The five characters stand before the audience as they recite these lines as if allowing us to examine them like livestock while describing the “architectural design” of both their neighborhood, but also themselves. They are meant to be a little rough around the edges (“just bricks and mortar”) maybe not as posh and pristine as the upper class, but they are a family who will be there for each other (such as during an ill-advised bar fight) just as much as East London is a home that has been there for them when the rest of the world shuts them out.

Warren’s decision to incorporate realistic and three-dimensional struggles into the lives of his five characters breathes 21^st century life into an old and common subject. Including voices from varied age, gender, race, and sexual orientation to tell a story about class, exemplifies that the same difficulties these characters face affect all people, not just some distant subset of lower class workers. Anyone born into a less affluent neighborhood, and growing up in a less privileged family could just as easily have been born into a wealthy, prosperous family. There is no physiological, mental, emotional, or evolutionary difference between people of different classes, and Warren’s play highlights that beyond the cockney accents and the ostentatious clothing choices, “we are all just flesh and that we are all just bone.”

The character story that touched me the most was actually the one I had the least in common with, but which I knew all too well. Jamal’s commentary on what it’s like to be a black man living in a bad neighborhood, feeling hopeless at the idea of ever possibly having a different life, was particularly touching due to racial tensions today in the US increasingly rising with no cutoff in sight, and seeming to be utterly lacking in solutions, resources, and awareness. Jamal speaking about the racism that permeates his daily life and prevents him from ever being able to find another job in another city, and about the way people see him and make assumptions about who he is before he ever even has a chance could be cut directly from a news story in the US today about racial profiling or racist police calls (except that the news stories wouldn’t be written in the same rhythmic poetry). When he starts his second monologue, in scene 10, he says “Do I bore thee? With incessant anger and poisonous disposition. Or perhaps I be frightful, my contentious survival through this wasteland rattles you? I clutch on to my woes like chains around satanic hounds, foaming through razored teeth, snarling at my foes… for nobody really knows me.” His words echo reminiscent of a darker, more desperate and more bitter version of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” His narrative expresses the sort of hole a person can be born into because they’re born with marks already against them before they even get the chance to take their first breath. And the kind of trapped desperation that comes from feeling like no matter what you do it doesn’t matter anyway because the odds are stacked against you is very present in our political climate today, globally, not necessarily just for minority populations, but also for people living in lower class neighborhoods. Jamal’s portrayal dispels with the one-sided, myopic belief that people in these situations choose it, or don’t try for anything else, or are somehow just all around bad guys. Jamal is a drug dealer and a brute, but he is also a good son, and a virgin who is shy around women, and a fan of The Great British Bake Off among many other things. These characteristics don’t all necessarily align with or contradict each other, they just serve to create a three-dimensional person and give the narrative back to the person living the story.

Warren’s take on each separate character’s difficulties in addition to Jamal’s: the raging monster, the closeted gay brother, the borderline incest happening between grandfather and granddaughter serves to somehow simultaneously play into stereotypes while also defying them. It doesn’t try to completely ignore and reject the stereotypes surrounding lower working class families, but instead it attempts an even more ambitious feat which is to show these people as exactly what society thinks of them, and also much more.