The Secret to Race: There’s No Catharsis

Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company: The Shipment (Gerding Theater)
By Jens Larson

The reviews from Young Jean Lee‘s four-week run of The Shipment in New York were almost uniformly positive, and for good reason. Performed in three vignettes, the play’s script is splendidly humorous as well as bitingly caustic, and the performers move expertly and effortlessly through dance, song and several genres of drama.

The Shipment opens with a frantic dance scene that seems simultaneously serious and blackface, and it’s not clear if the audience is supposed to be impressed or slightly taken aback. Such is the tone of The Shipment as a whole.
The dance functions as a prelude to Douglas Scott Streater’s brash, sometimes hilarious, and always foul-mouthed monologue. Modeled on the popular stand-up comedy of contemporary urban comics (think Def Comedy Jam), Streater’s performance intertwines scatological humor and racial critique in manner that should make any self-reflective viewer agonizingly self-conscious and paranoid about their own conception of black/white race relationships. From the crowd’s half-laughter at some rather wonderful jokes, it was clear the mostly white audience did not know how to respond.
Lee’s script through this section is not meant to be gentle, nor does it allow the white audience member the opportunity to slip into the guilt-laden sentiment that tends to pass for racial catharsis in white America. Lee delays this catharsis even through the end of The Shipment, and it is the tension that helps the piece cohere.
In the second section–a minstrel-like parody of any commercially “black” drama you’ve ever seen–we follow Omar (Okieriete Onodowan), an aspiring rapper who suffers through stereotypically “black” problems: an overworked mother, a drug-dealing neighbor, a drive-by shooting, a flawed criminal justice system, etc. Even with Onodowan and his supporting actors delivering their lines in a mechanistic deadpan, the scenes are brilliant and hilarious; it is the most comedic section of The Shipment. The performances by Mikeah Ernest Jennings and Prentice Onayemi are especially memorable.
A short and tone-shifting a capella interlude (Modest Mouse’s “Dark Center of the Universe”) features Amelia Workman singing several beautiful harmonies with Onodawan and Prentice Onayemi, and then we enter the final and longest section of the performance.
Here Lee mingles the sitcom atmosphere of Friends with the destructive living room scenes of the best bourgeois tragedy. While Streater’s character is the center of the drama, Onayemi’s character–doing some blow, confessing his love, yelling out loudly, disjointing natural language patterns–manages to commandeer the stage. Yet even here the drama coheres, for although the first two sections make audiences squirm, this last section lets the issue of race simmer just below the surface.
The play is in Portland for three days on a world tour that includes stops in Brussels, Vienna and Paris, and it offers Portlanders the opportunity to see intellectual but approachable off-Broadway drama. It is a splendid use of an evening.