Reflecting on Pandemic Social Justice: A Review of 6 by 6
Writing and Visuals by Odessa Neeley
A Black woman, masked, is illuminated on center stage. Her face contorts beneath a plastic window.
“Who delivered us pork? We are vegan,” she cries into the screen.
This is the new theatre. “6 by 6: Collected Perspectives on Social Justice” tackles implicit racial bias and pandemic anxieties in a whirlwind of short plays, delivered via YouTube livestream. Instead of playbills, the actor’s photos and credits flash on-screen between each act. It is the first of the University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts’ mainstage series to be presented in this format.
Each of the five acts are written by Black alumni playwrights who were commissioned to express their individual social justice perspectives.
The acts are unbiased in revealing the shortcomings of their characters. “The blatant racism in this play is astonishing!” decries a comment underneath the video. Yet many of them contain characters who both engage in stereotyping and are victimized by it. In “Refugee in Detroit” by Keith Josef Adkins, vegan restaurant owner Terri is unable to reconcile her social anxieties as a Black woman with those of a Muslim woman. We see Terri move from fearing the pork has been delivered to her restaurant as an intentional hate crime, to accusing the Muslim woman of having the meat sent out of spite.
“#Masks” by Micah Ariel James indiscriminately calls out the implicit biases and hypocrisies that characters both perpetrate and are victimized by, all in the context of the pandemic. Most notably, a white woman in a Black Lives Matter mask is critiqued for portraying herself as overtly “woke”on social media. The same actress switches characters later to become an athletics director giving a press conference. She is volleyed with sexist questions. The camera pans between actors onstage as if it is reflecting the piece’s social turmoil.
In “Into the Night” by Kim Euell, a tall Black actor in pastel blue begins a wistful monologue. He paces about the stage to the rise and fall of a piano rhythm, voice slightly muffled but still holding an edge. He suddenly approaches the camera.
“Hot night,” he says through three literal walls⏤mask, camera, computer screen. His breath fogs the plastic mask screen.
The monologue rumbles through the emotions of a black cop in Harlem as he grapples with police shootings and feels complicit in the violence. Combined with the static camera frame he paces about, we are granted a front row view to his impassioned narration. When Ajax rejects his career, we feel him progress through fury, pain, and finally deliverance when he once again finds purpose in his community.
Applause, Applause! viewers type into the live chat after each act.
“Honey Wars” by Anton C. Jones moves the stage outdoors to a honey farm setting, an advantage of a live-streamed performance. A soft breeze blows behind the actor’s voices. Despite its tranquil setting, the act is charged with fear. There is visible tension when a tax collector arrives and the two Black women running the farm dispute the payment. The camera follows actors about the porch in a close frame, making it feel more intimate than a live viewing. Their faces are half obscured yet we see the expressions in their eyes more clearly.
In the final act, “Princeton Junction” by Levy Lee Simon, racism is attacked with blunt frustration. We witness a conversation dripping with white supremacy between two men on a New Jersey train as a Black woman listens in. When one of the men leaves, she takes his place and confronts the other for his complicit participation. It is certainly not a critique on the particular conversation, rather it is commentary on us as a whole. As an example of the consequences we face acting as simple bystanders, the second man does not object strongly enough to the first to correct his behavior. In the course of his conversation with the woman, Katherine, we see that although he considers himself more educated than his friend, he lacks understanding of how deeply ingrained racism is in modern society.
“I am not here to educate you,” Katherine says in the beginning, yet by the end she has explained slavery’s aftershocks and racial stereotyping to him. It is a sharply accurate imitation of where we are now, lacking understanding of how history shapes today and unwilling to seek enlightenment from those who experienced it. We often expect others to explain why we should care about the forces acting against them, as opposed to curating a true interest in why social injustices continue to be perpetrated.
The final screen rests on a tribute to Black lives lost, their faces projected onto the background. A chorus chants say her name and how many more to the rhythm of drums.
The show debuted Oct. 10 to approximately one hundred live viewers, but a recording is available until Dec. 15 here.
