“I contain multitudes,” proclaims actor Ashley Oviedo during an early moment in Eliana Pipes’ Hoops, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s entry in the World Premiere Wisconsin festival.
Oviedo nominally makes that proclamation as Cee, joining Aye (Celia Mandela Rivera) and Bey (Paulina Lule) as the named characters in Pipes’ play.
But as quickly became clear while I watched Hoops alongside an enthusiastic and engaged industry-night audience on Monday, those individual character names don’t begin to capture the multitudes embodied in Pipes’ play.
Before the 80 minutes comprising Hoops breathlessly run their course, the three actors in the MCT cast have embodied scores of characters: Young and old. Black, brown and indigenous. Rural and urban. Dead and alive. Male and female and nonbinary.
They’ll speak in Spanish and in English. Move to the rhythm of an indigenous drum and dance their way from disco to hip-hop.
They’ll present poignant monologues, comic skits, and choreopoems, moving in a blink from comedy to tragedy and back again while serving as a Greek chorus and regularly breaking the fourth wall.
And yes, they’ll wear hoops, as light as a baby’s breath and as large as dinner plates, in a dizzying array of shapes and colors and materials and styles.
They’ll wear lots of hoops, as a mural featuring twelve of their many hoop-wearing selves watch over them from upstage. They’ll move about a semi-circular, gold-flecked set suggesting pieces of a pair of hoops, to be rounded and completed by the audience on whom the lights come up as the actors tell us that we ourselves are seen, much as we see them on stage.
Toward a More Inclusive Criticism
Well, but wait. Who is this “we” in the audience that I’ve just so casually invoked?
As a white male, I can’t possibly experience what it means to be “seen” by Pipes’ play in the same way that the many global majority audience members Monday night might claim to have been seen.
Nor can I possibly “see” and experience the many layers in Pipes’ play in the same way that such an audience member might – bearing in mind that global majority audience members will themselves have multiple responses to what they’ve watched, reflecting their own unique, necessarily distinct cultural and individual experiences.
The bottom line: Most critics were (and still are) white men, which inevitably skews what is seen and how it is assessed.
I’m not suggesting I can’t or shouldn’t try to articulate why I loved Pipes’ play.
For 500 years throughout the Americas, our individual stories have been tangling even as they unspooled, creating an interwoven tapestry of blood, violence, and hate but also of hope and dreams and love. I am part of that story. I have a right to be moved when I hear part of it. On Monday night, I was.
But given how conscious Hoops itself is of cultural appropriation, I’m also mindful of what I might be missing while I watch. As Nicole Acosta – creator of the HOOPS Project that inspired Pipes’ play – said to me, “there’s room for people outside my culture to appreciate it, as long as they do so in a way that’s informed by respect.”
What might such critical respect – for Hoops or any play – look like?
The Covid pandemic – during which the arts have been among the hardest hit sectors of our economy – reinforced my growing belief that traditional arts journalism isn’t the only way to promote meaningful and nuanced discussion of plays and books, music and art.
“A good critic,” mused legendary critic Linda Winer in an interview several years ago, “is someone with an interesting mind. It isn’t the yes or the no that matters – it’s the why. Everything we do is about trying to explain the why.”
Whether as a dramaturg, educator, preview and program writer, podcast host, or now as your faithful festival blogger, I’ve spent the five years since leaving the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in trying to offer the same sort of nuanced appreciation and assessment I once tried to provide as a critic, while simultaneously avoiding the necessarily reductive sense that I was issuing a verdict regarding what I’d observed.
We don’t need such thin and limiting judgments. We need texture. We need context. We need the love that accompanies every genuine effort to bridge the gap between I and Thou, you and me. In the words of E.M. Forster, we need to connect, more than ever.
But how? And on whose terms?
Every vignette – every moment – I watched Monday night drove home that what’s true with hoops and hair is true more generally of how the global majority is regularly expected to “straighten” and “flatten,” as Rivera tells us in one of Aye’s monologues. “I was shrinking down smaller,” Aye remembers.
But “we don’t need to play their game,” Lule insists as Bey. “We can bring our full selves,” with all the multitudes this implies.
Arts criticism must similarly expand how much it sees, while adopting a more expansive and appreciative view of what it sees. Jose Solís, a Honduran culture critic based in New York, rightly insists that criticism must constantly be reinvented. “If the arts keep evolving,” Solís asks, “why has criticism remained essentially the same since the 19th century?”
“A good critic,” Sondheim wrote in the second of his two perceptive books on lyrics, “is someone who recognizes and acknowledges the artist’s intentions and the work’s aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been.
“A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you’d never have imagined you’d want to go to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find.”
Global Majority Theater
“It was so exciting to see myself in Tennessee Williams, in Beckett and Caryl Churchill,” said Black playwright Jeremy O. Harris in a recent interview.
“But there came a point when I was like, ‘Wait, have Black people never done anything like this?’ And when I discovered that not only had they, but so many had done it to wild acclaim, and yet no one I talked to remembered the acclaim or knew those people, I knew that something had to be done about this cultural amnesia.”
I stand by what I’ve said many times, in podcasts and in print: many of the most exciting new plays being written right now are by global majority playwrights. We need to combat the amnesia Harris talks about by seeing those plays and then commemorating more of them, in Wisconsin as well as everywhere else.
And we need more global majority critics who can write about them with a sense of what those plays mean and why they matter.
Solís’ BIPOC Critics Lab – launched in 2020 and now embedded at The Public Theater after a two-year stint at the Kennedy Center – is playing an invaluable role in overcoming that critical deficit. Thirty global majority critics who’ve participated in Solís’ program have now had their work published. It’s a start.
So are plays like Hoops, companies like Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, and festivals like World Premiere Wisconsin.
“If you’re a human who wants more homegrown work on Milwaukee stages from perspectives other than the Eurocentric traditions that still dominate,” you should be supporting plays like Hoops, Brent Hazelton wrote in a recent Facebook post.
Since becoming MCT’s Artistic Director, Hazelton hasn’t been shy about his commitment to such work. In addition to collaborating with Black Arts MKE’s Bronzeville Arts Ensemble to launch the annual Milwaukee Black Theater Festival, 9 of the first 13 MCT shows under Hazelton’s watch have been written by global majority playwrights.
As with every new play being staged through World Premiere Wisconsin itself, the opportunity to see such work challenges how and what we see, broadening our perspective beyond the prescriptive confines of what’s been done and what we think we know.
In short, premieres like Hoops put the world in Wisconsin, creating circles as big and imaginative as Shakespeare’s “wooden O” while encompassing the entire globe – the home we share and make, together.
Hoops runs through April 2 at the Studio Theatre in the Broadway Theatre Center, 158 N. Broadway, Milwaukee. For tickets, go to https://www.milwaukeechambertheatre.org/hoops.
