{"id":1085,"date":"2012-04-16T14:32:04","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T18:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ting.theredcolobus.com\/?p=1085"},"modified":"2012-04-16T14:32:04","modified_gmt":"2012-04-16T18:32:04","slug":"review-we-are-proud-to-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/?p=1085","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: We Are Proud to Present&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">From \u201cDown but not defeated: Four views from the margins.\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/demo-img-1.jpg\">NEW YORKER<\/a>. 16 April 2012.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">By Hilton Als.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Too few women playwrights deal directly with politics in their work. Some may have bought into the clich\u00e9 that women are better at writing character than they are at writing plot\u2014and what is politics if not plot-driven? <!--more-->The thirty-year-old black playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury refutes this notion, and so much else, in her grand play \u201cWe Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915\u201d (directed by Eric Ting, at the Victory Gardens, in Chicago). The show provides a thrilling opportunity to see both a serious new talent developing her voice and what an inspiring director can do to encourage it. The piece is about theatre, and how to \u201cplay\u201d politics onstage\u2014the politics, in this case, being the history of conquest and colonization in Namibia.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Of the six cast member, all of whom are emotionally open (Bernard Balbot, in particular, is an actor of frightening, escalating intensity), five \u201cbecome\u201d white racists, regardless of their actual skin color, while Kamal Angelo Bolden, as Black Man, can only be black. When, in a Jean Genet-like move, the cast tries to lynch him, the game ends and he walks offstage, inconsolable. The object of racism <em>is<\/em> often inconsolable, and this is one true moment among many in the piece. Ting is a magician who doesn\u2019t have to pull anything out of a hat: it\u2019s all there in the script. What he\u2019s terrific at is making stage pictures that not only frame Drury\u2019s big thoughts and bigger imagination but ground them so that the actors can take off.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/demo-img-1.jpg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From \u201cDown but not defeated: Four views from the margins.\u201d\u00a0NEW YORKER. 16 April 2012. By Hilton Als. Too few women playwrights deal directly with politics in their work. Some may have bought into the clich\u00e9 that women are better at writing character than they are at writing plot\u2014and what is politics if not plot-driven?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tingericting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}