The Submission: Does Gay Equal Black in the Oppression Sweepstakes?

Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective
The Submission by Jeff Talbott
Through February 25, 2017, at the BeBe Theatre

A playwright is accosted on the New York subway by young toughs, who taunt him about his sneakers.  The playwright is white and gay. The toughs are black. The sneakers are so gay. 

The playwright, who has had no luck getting his plays produced, later has an inspiration. He'll write about a young black man and his alcoholic single mother struggling to get out of the projects.

The play is heartfelt. His friends tell him it's powerful.

The writer, Danny Larson, submits it to the prestigious Humana Festival of new plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, which has launched many important new playwrights. To his amazement, it is accepted. This self-professed "white dude" has found his voice, and maybe his career, by channeling black lives.

But there's a problem. Danny assumed his play would have no chance under his very white-sounding name. So he submitted it as a fictitious woman he calls Shaleeha G'ntamobi. The name sounds very black, he thinks. Now he needs to hire a black actress to impersonate Shaleeha during rehearsals. 

This is the set-up for The Submission, a play by Jeff Talbott, being given its own heartfelt and powerful production by the Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective at the BeBe Theatre downtown through February 25.

The reveal comes in the third scene, as Danny, played by Jon Stockdale, tells the actress he's hoping to hire, Emilie (an assured Kirby Gibson), how his subway encounter implanted these black characters in his imagination.

Stockdale here has an actor's transparency that makes an audience see what the character is seeing. It's a low-key moment, one of the actor's best, in a play bustling with angry confrontations that can, and sometimes do, tempt actors into too much acting.

It takes awhile for this production and this play to reach this place of unforced truthfulness. Two prior scenes are teasers. First Danny anxiously watches his graduate school pal Trevor read his play in a coffee shop and pronounce it brilliant. At his apartment he tells his boyfriend that his submission has been accepted. And then he drops the bombshell that he's masked his real identify. 

If you've read any of the promos about the production, you know where this is headed and can only wish it would get there sooner. If you didn't know, you're probably more confused than intrigued.

The slow start is even slower with Danny and Trevor's conversational style. You know, er, lots of stammers, um, hesitations, broken phrases, and, like, overlapping words. That may be what the playwright asks for. If so, the director, Stephanie Hickling Beckman, could take a tip from a later scene that says playwrights shouldn't always get what they ask for.

Trevor is played by Travis Lewis as a dude's dude, two parts Jack Nicholson with a shark's smile, one part Jeff Bridges. Danny may be a little in love with his straighter-than-thou friend (Trevor drinks beer out of a bottle, while Pete drinks a glass of red wine). And Pete is jealous that Danny let Trevor read the play first. This hint of a subplot is alluded to later but doesn't develop. 

The Danny-Trevor-Pete triangle turns quadrilateral when Emilie and Trevor become a couple. One of the production's most entertaining scenes has Emilie in her hotel bedroom in Louisville and Trevor in the New York coffee shop having telephone sex. There are lots of people around him, he tells her, half embarrassed, half boastful, and  gestures towards the audience.

It's one witty meta-theatre moment of several where the playwright reminds us we're watching a play about a playwright and actors making a play. Another comes from Maximilian Koger as Pete after one of those angry confrontations. "I've had enough of actors," he says, storming out of the hotel room where Danny and Emilie have been shouting at each other.

Koger recently made a robust sailor in love with the heroine in Asheville Community Theatre's Sweeney Todd. Here he gives Pete a winsome sweetness with a sharp edge of camp. Curiously for a play written in 2011, his Pete is more Mr. Humphries from Are You Being Served than Will McKormack from Will and Grace.
 
Danny and Emilie shout at each other a lot. Their arguments are the play's main dramatic strategy. Can a white man write authentically about black lives? Does a gay man's experience of oppression equate to a black woman's? And who owns the play? The white man who conceived it or the black woman who brought it to term?

At first Talbott gives his antagonists a level playing field. Emilie calls out Danny for the implied racism of the name he manufactured for his imaginary black female alter ego. He retorts that she immediately assumed the young men on the subway were black. He hadn't specified their race.

But as Danny comes out as a closet racist, and an oddly clumsy one, the balance of sympathy tips towards Emilie. Gibson portrays her winningly without an inkling of angry-black-woman stereotype.

Talbott's other dramatic strategy is keeping us in suspense about when, how, or even if Danny and Emilie's hoax will be exposed.

Beckman keeps the heat on high and the tension building. The commitment to ensemble playing she pulls from her actors is palpable. 

The director occasionally lets the pace drag  with lengthy set changes from coffee shop to apartment to hotel room to outside a rehearsal room to the stage of the theatre in Louisville. Designer Nathan Singer has created clever periaktoi that pivot and roll from place to place, but less scenery would have been more on the tiny BeBe stage. The costume design team calling themselves Justin Day gives the men understated, appropriately lived-in looking clothes, with a bright splash of fashion pizzazz for Emilie.  Her yellow dress for opening night is a knockout, and so is she.

Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective says it presents works which "confront issues of social diversity in a provocative way." With that mission in mind, Beckman, the group's artistic director, hammers the play's arguments rather than polishing its subtle satire of identify politics.

Still, she raises an often-debated question: Is it okay for a white writer to tell a black story? We heard that about Kathryn Stockett's 2009 novel The Help. As Beckman welcomes the audience, there's a banner behind her announcing the company's final play of the season: Shakespeare's Othello. Is this Beckman's way of answering her own question? Or is it another way of asking it?

Information:  www.differentstrokespac.org/

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