52 pages • 1 hour read
Fairview
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Themes
The Voyeuristic White Gaze
Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions and discussions of racism, race, and Black racial stereotypes.
In the first act of the play, the audience takes the comfortable role of sitting, silent and unseen, in a dark theater and watching the Frasier family’s drama unfold. This voyeurism is a normal, expected part of attending a play. Theater audiences, which are usually made up of people who are predominantly white, educated, and upper-middle class, observe the action onstage and then retreat to homes and coffee shops to privately discuss and analyze what they have just watched. In most cases, the text of the play is written long before the performance, so theatrical performances often reflect little cognizance of how the weight of the voyeuristic white gaze imposes itself and shapes what it watches. Act I gives only subtle indications of Drury’s intention to upend common theatrical conventions in an attempt to reveal and indict the harmful effects of the white gaze. To this end, the epigram before the play quotes Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), an autoethnographic text in which the author speaks philosophically about the production of Blackness as a social construct shaped by the imposition of the values and culture of white colonizers. Drury therefore asserts that under the white gaze, Blackness is hyper-visible, along with all the value judgements that are imposed on Black skin by a society ingrained with attitudes of white supremacy. The onstage characters are all Black, and the play tacitly purports to portray a Black family in the private, domestic sphere, ostensibly offering an exclusive look at Black lives in their natural state, without the imposition of the white gaze. However, Drury consciously casts the audience itself in the role of the white gaze, and therefore, in Act I of the play, the playwright is fully cognizant that the real-life audience will be ironically and unthinkingly settling in for the popular pastime of consuming Black stories. In Act II, four white voices emerge to overshadow the onstage action with their conversation about race, emphasizing the ubiquity of the white gaze and its perceived entitlement to interpret and define Black identity.
Ironically, while the onstage play offers the illusion of an exclusive view of private Black life, the emergence of the white voices in Act II shows a presumably private conversation that four white people are having about race, in which they all make comments and claims that they would most likely never utter in the presence of a Black person or any person of color. In Act II, the usually heavy silence of the white gaze is thus allowed to become narration. Jimbo, Suze, Mack, and Bets are ostensibly there to watch the play, but as they rudely ignore the onstage action in favor of their own conversation, they ironically remain unaware of the judgment-laden aspects of their own surveillance. As they speak about race and identity with enormous confidence, they fail to question whether their limited perspective might hinder their knowledge. The way that they watch the play therefore mimics the way that they observe all people of color, and this correlation becomes clear as they ignore the parts of the play that depict deeply nuanced Black lives within a loving family. Disregarding the fact that the Frasiers are grappling with normal issues and conflicts that are not always about being Black, the four spectators only pay attention when the characters start demonstrating bits of stereotypical Black culture. Thus, the white spectators shape and reify their limited constructions of Blackness by refusing to pay attention to any depictions of human complexity. They are watching the play, but they are not seeing its true meaning. Additionally, because they are isolated and separate from the characters onstage, their overhead voices place them in an implicit position of superiority. Their strident insistence that their stereotyping and generalizations are not evidence of racism serves to reveal their white fragility. When Jimbo rants about seeing his life as a movie in which he is the filmmaker who wields ultimate control, he devolves into shouting and demanding attention, and in the midst of this entitled tirade, he remains unaware of the implications of centering himself in the scene instead of watching the Black family onstage.
Metatheatricality as a Metaphor for the Performance of Race
In most theatrical performances, audiences are encouraged to willingly suspend disbelief and view the characters onstage as if they are real. This dynamic allows them to become emotionally invested in the narrative and the characters. In the first act of Fairview, the audience is lulled into this traditional illusion, engaging in the usual passive, unobtrusive consumption that they have been trained to perform. “Theatricality” therefore describes the creation of these illusions, which suggest that everything that occurs onstage has veracity within the world of the play. “Metatheatricality,” on the other hand, describes conventions of performance that are designed to remind audiences that they are in a theater and are watching a play. Such moments often involve actors breaking character or breaking the fourth wall—the invisible, imaginary barrier that separates the audience from the stage.
In the first act, the play starts with the presumption of theatrical illusion, but small metatheatrical moments cause the edges of that illusion to curl up and reveal the theatrical mechanisms beneath. While many plays employ aspects of metatheatricality, Drury catapults this concept beyond mere plot device and into the realm of theme, using metatheatrical moments to emphasize that in real life, the oppression of the white gaze distorts the authenticity of Black lives and takes delight in twisting the characteristics of real people to fit the farcical framework of an overgeneralized and stereotyped performance. Thus, the imposition of the four voices on the primary narrative in Act II begins the process of distortion, and as Suze, Jimbo, Mack, and Bets continue to indulge in racist commentary, the action on the stage begins to slip and shift, becoming a warped version of the highly nuanced and realistic family dynamics depicted in Act I. All the while, the chattering voices prevent Drury’s real audience from forgetting that they are watching a play—a construct-within-a-construct—that is designed to force them to decide which of the spectators’ comments resonate, thereby revealing the audience’s own unarticulated preconceptions about race.
In a continuation of this theme, the Frasier family members maintain their reality and identities as if the imposition of the four voices is not causing their world to unravel. Only Keisha recognizes that something is wrong, and her deeper perception implies that, unlike the older generation, she is not resigned to shifting and adapting her own world in order to accommodate the limitations of the white gaze. In the second act, the four white voices also fail to acknowledge that they are watching actors, commenting instead on how the characters perform race. They are especially pleased whenever the Frasier family’s mannerisms or attitudes align with familiar stereotypes of Blackness, and when Suze, Jimbo, Mack, and Bets inject themselves into the performance, they wear various stereotypes of Blackness like costumes. Thus, Drury once again employs metatheatricality to frame racist stereotypes as a gauche and farcical performance that distorts reality. For example, Jimbo turns Tyrone, the lawyer, into his imagined version of a street thug, while Mack puts on drag as his idea of a fabulous and feisty Black woman. Likewise, Suze and Bets compete for the role of the matriarch, with Suze inserting herself awkwardly by trying to channel her childhood nanny and forcing a presumption of familiarity that makes Keisha uncomfortable. Bets plays Mama as a tough, hypersexualized, and sassy woman, making up for Suze, who is deemed too uptight to be Black. The four tear the family apart by forcing stereotypical plights into the narrative, such as teen pregnancy, foreclosure, and drugs. Within this context, the playwright’s use of metatheatricality empowers the viewer to become far more than a passive observer, for Keisha pleads with the white people in the audience to take their place on stage, letting the Black people sit in the audience to escape the scrutiny that forces them to keep playing their assigned roles.
Authenticity, Appearances, and Reality Checks
At the beginning of the first act, the stage directions specify that Beverly is peeling “real carrots” (7), a detail that hints at “kitchen sink realism,” or the theatrical convention of focusing on the lives of working-class characters. In preparing real food, Beverly is not technically acting, nor is the actor who plays her character. The scene thus focuses on the completion of an authentic action, however inconsequential it may be. While theatrical performances are full of such moments, this particular play blurs and then destroys the lines that separate authenticity, appearances, and reality, so Drury’s choice to begin the play with an authentic act is deliberately ironic. This basic act of reality becomes the foundational layer in an increasingly complex performance of deep social nuance, but the progression of this shift occurs systematically, and unlike Acts II and III, the construction of reality in Act I is designed to observe standard conventions and remain familiar and comfortable for habitual theatergoers. In this initial version, the audience members dwell in the same basic real world as the actors and the carrots, but they are invisible in the dark theater, so focused on the constructed reality on the stage that both actors and audience momentarily cease to exist as the “reality” of the narrative asserts itself. The characters in the first act thus create additional layers of appearances and realities that comprise the secrets they keep from each other, and the story becomes rife with the things that exist within the characters’ minds but remain unsaid, along with elements of dramatic irony, in which the audience sees something that the characters do not.
Humor arises from the onstage characters’ attempts to create and uphold appearances, as when Jasmine’s claim to be dairy-free is contrasted with her surreptitious attack on the cheese plate; the effect is further heightened when she tries to hide a wad of stolen, half-chewed brie to avoid being caught. Thus, even within the “reality” of the onstage narrative, a division exists between authenticity and appearances. In the second act, the added layer of the four spectators reinforces the constructed nature of theatricality, especially given that these voices are superimposed over a silent repetition of the first act. However, the true irony exists in the fact that these four spectators are also actors, and their characters create layers of truth and appearance as they reveal their various misconceptions about race. Each voice expresses a very limited comprehension of the cultures of other races, and they all assert their supposed expertise by flaunting the stereotypes they know; for example, they are confident that Latinx people are fiery, that “Asian” people are uptight with mean parents, and that all the intricacies of Black culture can be transmitted through a hired nanny who sometimes cooked collard greens. Each of these characters believes that they can perform their chosen non-white race with authenticity, and they are not dissuaded or convinced otherwise by their disastrous efforts to seamlessly join the Frasiers onstage in Act III. However, despite the tacit knowledge that the Frasier family members are played by actors, those actors do not emerge during Act III’s breakdown of theatrical illusion. Even as the white characters impose racist stereotypes upon the narrative and reveal it to be a narrative rather than a reality, Keisha addresses the audience as Keisha, not as an actor. Thus, Drury implies that the embodiment of these stereotypes makes them real, reinforcing their existence until these tropes obliterate the authenticity underneath. As a result, the honors student becomes a teen mom, and a hardworking, strait-laced father is now saddled with the stigma of drug addiction. Even as Keisha pleads with the real-life audience, she remains unable to separate her own authentic self from the stereotypes imposed upon her. Drury therefore suggests that reality itself is morphed by appearances, and authenticity, if it exists at all, is a moving target.
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