Rage @ The Elevator Project (ATTPAC)
—Jill Sweeney
“You wear the label proudly/It is justified, your superpower/When the breaking point happens/It is your anger that rescues and restores you.”
—Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul, “The Odyssey of An Angry Black Woman,” 2019
“Marginality [is] much more than a site of deprivation. In fact I was saying just the opposite: that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.”
—bell hooks, “Marginality As a Site of Resistance,”1990
As a white person, it’s still all too rare to sit in the audience of a show that isn’t written for you.
To be clear, that’s in no way to say that playwright Janelle Gray’s searing piece Rage, a one-act play produced as part of ATTPAC’s The Elevator Project and focused on the experiences of Black women in America, doesn’t speak to non-Black audiences—there were several moments in the piece so powerful and so moving that I was brought to the edge of tears. Gray’s voice, without question, can speak to anyone with functioning ears.
But in watching the play, I was consistently struck by how little I knew about the history and events being explored. While audience members around me gave knowing chuckles or let out noises of agreement or distress, I felt consistently on the outside looking in. It’s terribly, unforgivably easy to forget how much of the culture we experience and absorb is centered on the white experience of the world, and the revisionist histories of America we’re taught that marginalize the experiences of every other culture to footnotes. But what a privilege (the good kind) to be witness to a re-centering of the narrative as powerful as this one.
Rage holds a singular object—Black women’s anger—up to the light, and turns it around and around, shining light through its many facets to reveal new truths. The play’s five actresses—Victoria Angelina Cruz, Jazzay Jabbar, Tharmella Nyahoza, Natasha Wells, and Catherine Whiteman—move seamlessly (almost as a unit at times) through nine essentially linear scenes centered on historical events large and small. From the Cherokee Slave Revolt of 1842 to the nationwide Streetcar Boycott of 1903 to the funeral of Beulah Mae Donald in 1988—the woman who, according to The New York Times, “beat the Klan” after suing them for the lynching of her son, Michael Donald—each vignette worked to push the audience, in Gray’s words, “to re-evaluate what we call rebellion,” to look at the many ways throughout American history that Black women have expressed, or suppressed, or channeled, their rage.
Each actress is given her moment to shine in Rage, and each actress rises to the challenge, ably guided by Tiana Kaye Blair’s committed, empathetic direction. I particularly enjoyed the mirror-image fifth scene between Cruz as a black woman “passing” for white, with all the benefits and burdens that creates, and Jabbar as her friend, forced to pretend to be her friend’s maid just to be able to visit her. In each half of the scene, one woman speaks while the other reacts wordlessly—Jabbar in particular got to show off not only her dramatic chops but her comedic ones as well.
Nyahoza (the play’s youngest actress) starts the play off with a bang as a student railing at never being taught the truth about her Cherokee heritage, and later, portraying another student, moves nimbly from frustration to fear (and finally to defiance) as she asserts her right to attend a non-HCBU college after a racist campus prank. Whiteman’s turn in the third scene as a houseworker cajoling her fellow workers to boycott streetcars after a new law requiring segregated seating was passed showed wit and wisdom, but her most affecting moment was as the grieving friend to the deceased Beulah Mae Miller, railing at her friend for putting all Black women’s sons at risk by defying the Klan. She rages at the forgiveness Miller showed her son’s killer in court. (“You take my child, I don’t have no cheeks to turn!”)
And finally, Wells brought the play to a close, and the audience to its feet, in the play’s closing scene, as a Black mother and lawyer in Anywhere, USA, 2022, demanding the footage of her child’s death in a police “incident.” Wells’ exhibits phenomenal control as the speech builds to a shattering climax, seething that the powers-that-be picked “the right woman on the wrong day” for the fight ahead.
The play’s connective tissue is music, with scene transitions accompanied by the actresses singing traditional spirituals, some better known, including “This Little Light of Mine,” and some less known, in particular the fantastic call-out song “Scandalize My Name!” (Not for nothing, if the cast puts out an album of these songs, I’d snap it up—each actress’s voice is better than the last.) The songs (whose presence was suggested by director Blair) serve to bridge past and present, calling back but also re-mixed, as it were, to speak to the present. Thankfully, the actress’ voices were powerful enough to overcome the acoustics of the Wyly Theatre’s studio space, which occasionally created some issues in hearing the dialogue.
Rage is a clarion call to reexamine what rebellion looks like, and to pull Black women’s American experience from the footnotes into the text (as with The Elevator Project’s previous production, Soul Rep Theatre Company’s Do No Harm).Now in its 7th season, The Elevator Project continues to make space for new voices; you’ll want to catch this piece before it’s gone.
WHEN: Through April 9th
WHERE: Wyly Studio Theatre
