“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
– Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
I. Tragedy: Kenosha and the Jacob Blake Shooting
On August 23 in the summer that George Floyd was murdered, a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake – Black and just 29 years old – in the back. Seven times. Why did it happen? And will things ever change?
Martin McClendon, a professor at Kenosha-based Carthage College, knew that answering such questions required talking to Kenosha residents themselves. Together with fellow theater artist Nora Carroll as well as Carthage students Rayven Craft and Katherine Layendecker, he began gathering their stories.
The result is The Kenosha Verbatim Project, the latest in a series of Carthage plays – involving veterans, homelessness, women in the military, and healthcare workers during the pandemic – in which McClendon and his team serve as conduits, gathering the stories of community members and allowing them to speak in their own words.
Embodied by local community actors, those stories will come to life in a reading in Kenosha this Saturday night.
The Carthage team of four – two Black, two white – conducted 90-minute Zoom interviews of the dozen members of the Kenosha community included in the final script. Eight are Black; four are white. They include social workers and community activists, professors and pastors, librarians and journalists and small business owners.
Their stories are harrowing. Heartbreaking. And also occasionally hopeful.
During a recent Zoom meeting with me, McClendon couldn’t emphasize enough that for all the editing his team necessarily did in shaping these stories into a play, what we’ll hear Saturday is those stories themselves, unplugged. Think numerous Anna Deavere Smith plays or The Laramie Project; McClendon cites both as influences.
“I want to keep stressing that the real authors are the 12 people we interviewed, who opened up their hearts to us and let us know their story,” McClendon said. “We can’t ever forget that they ‘wrote’ the play.”
“All we’re doing is editing,” he added, noting that the Zoom interviews the Carthage team did could easily be 12 separate plays. “We want to always make sure to center them in the process.”
In telling those stories, the Carthage script first allows the project participants to introduce themselves as they begin sharing stories – stretching back decades – involving segregation, deindustrialization, redlining, microaggression, and consequent distrust.
They recount being the only person of color in a room. The birthday parties to which their Black children weren’t invited. The people insisting that racism no longer exists. “A shoe was going to drop in Kenosha,” says another. “I just felt like something’s going to happen if we don’t come together as a community.”
Even as it relives the Blake shooting and ensuing protests, the script’s great strength involves such wide-lens background material, which also includes residents speaking about disinvestment, social justice, and the criminal justice system. The picture that emerges is less about police brutality – horrific as that is – and more about longstanding systemic racism in America.
“Before George Floyd, I liked to think of myself as being enlightened,” said McClendon, who is white. But while he’d previously participated in various anti-racist task forces and study groups, McClendon said that he “still feels as though I’ve just scratched the surface.”
“Coming face-to-face with these stories,” he continued, means realizing anew that the Black experience in America not only involves “joy and celebration,” but also a “constant undercurrent of second-class citizen status and racism,” involving “the microaggressions that happen, as well as macroaggressions in terms of the political landscape and policy.”
“The takeaway is that we can’t ever stop talking about this until it’s actually fixed, which I don’t think is going to happen any time soon,” McClendon said. “It’s all our responsibilities. It’s not just Kenosha. And it’s not just Wisconsin.”
McClendon hopes Saturday’s audience emerges with a sense of our collective obligation to engage our community, rather than turning our back and making ill-founded and ignorant assumptions.
“I just think that we all need to take a step back and just maybe talk to somebody who doesn’t have the same lifestyle or perspective as you, and just try to have an open conversation,” one resident says in the Carthage script. “It’s important to have diversity in the room,” says a second. “You get a really distorted view of people you don’t have a lot of experience with,” says a third.
Each statement is a variation on a theme, driving home why the Carthage project is so important. Will we learn to listen to and engage with others’ truths? Or will we stridently continue to insist on our own, ignoring the possibility that we might be wrong?
“We all bring something to the table,” one resident says.
So stipulated. So why can’t we all sit down and break bread together? The very existence of The Kenosha Verbatim Project suggests that maybe, someday, we’ll overcome all that divides us so that we can.
II. Farce: Singing Alone in The Constructivists’ A Cappocalypse
Division is the order of the day in The Constructivists’ A Cappocalypse, or Oconomowocapella’s A Cappella Practice Has Been Cancelled, a devised piece by Andrew Hobgood and Joe Lino, with contributions from the various actors who’ll bring it to life in a reading in Milwaukee this Sunday afternoon.
If The Kenosha Verbatim Project holds out hope that we might somehow connect,
A Cappocalypse takes farcical aim at the societal malaise that often makes connection seem impossible.
“Andy sent me the bones of a story about where we are as a society,” Constructivists’ Artistic Director Jaimelyn Gray said to me during a recent conversation. “I immediately saw how it might align with the work our company does, involving dark and politically engaged comedy that pushes buttons.”
As A Cappocalypse gets underway, a mediocre and dysfunctional a cappella group is preparing for Wisconsin’s annual a cappella contest in the basement community room of the Oconomowoc Community Center.
Not that there’s anything communal about this petty band, whose members include squabbling twins, an especially narcissistic diva (with a day job as a county clerk), a lovelorn assistant to the assistant director, a self-described social media influencer, a politician, and his chief supporter.
And June. Living off the grid and convinced that birds are actually spying drones, she arrives late with tales of a bloody apocalypse unfolding beyond the doors and a fantastically bizarre conspiracy theory that can explain it all.
It’s simultaneously darkly funny, completely wackadoodle, and a scathing indictment of contemporary life in a country that can’t or won’t make sense of what happened to Jacob Blake, even as millions of Americans believe in Pizzagate and profess allegiance to QAnon while continuing to believe that the 2020 election was a hoax.
Gray ticked off some of what A Cappocalypse is sending up.
“Click bait. Thirty-second – make that ten-second – sound bytes. Making up facts, and believing so-called facts that simply aren’t true. Our fascination with celebrity and the latest, shiniest thing,” Gray said. “It’s a long list. What will it take to wake people up to the state we’re in?”
As Gray’s partial list indicates, A Cappocalypse is more than satirically pointed kicks and giggles which, she told me, had her cast “rolling” with laughter during rehearsal.
As Dave Malloy recently underscored in his haunting musical Octet – also unfolding in a basement and addressing some of the same issues being tackled in A Cappocalypse – an a cappella group ideally reminds us of what art in the age of mechanical reproduction often forgets: it’s made by and for human beings, collaborating to tell a story that tries to make sense of their world.
Singing a cappella, “we come together, no longer divided by our different vocal ranges, but united in our shared love for song,” one idealistic (and comparatively sane) member says. “We learn to appreciate what truly matters: harmony, passion, and understanding. Not the self-aggrandizing pursuit of prize and prestige. Not the sacrificing of communal connection.”
It sounds good, but is anyone listening?
Verbatim theater, McClendon said to me, “is a perfect example of us wielding the tools in our artistic tool box to respond to our community in need.” As practiced by the members of Oconomowocapella, art is about garnering social media clicks while singing for oneself, even in a group that’s ostensibly all about the sweet sound of harmony.
Will we ever learn?
In markedly different ways, both The Kenosha Verbatim Project and A Cappocalypse hope and trust that we can.
The first might make you cry. The second will make you laugh. Both dare to believe that by opening the door to the outside world, we’ll come to see how much more interesting and challenging it is than the narrowing walls and darkening rooms in which we stare at our screens, steadily losing sight of who we are and all we could be if we’d only come together in real time.
The reading of The Kenosha Verbatim Project is Saturday, May 20, at 7:30 pm at Carthage College’s Wartburg Theatre, 2001 Alford Park Dr., Kenosha. Tickets are free and will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/kenosha-verbatim-project/.
The reading of A Cappocalypse, or Oconomowocapella’s A Cappella Practice Has Been Cancelled is Sunday, May 21 at 4:00 pm at the Interchange Theater, 628 N. 10th St., Milwaukee. Tickets are free. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/a_cappocalypse/.
