I was still processing the election last week when I got to see a new production by Encores! of the musical “Ragtime.” It was sublime. The show, which is based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow, follows a Black pianist in the early 1900s as he encounters and responds to racial violence. That pianist, Coalhouse Walker Jr., is a fictional character, but other characters include real-life celebrities of the period such as Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington and Harry Houdini.
The score is a soaring masterpiece. Somehow the lyricist Lynn Ahrens and the composer Stephen Flaherty, despite their long record of great work, are not often discussed in the hushed tones they deserve. Every song lands — ragtime as pretty as Scott Joplin’s, solid modern Broadway ballads and more, all cohering into a single organic work. The performances were stupendous, too, exceeding the already high standard set by previous Broadway productions.
But it was a small thing about the show that left the biggest impression on me. When the leader of the white toughs taunts and threatens Walker, he uses the N-word. Repeatedly.
These days, not just the use but even the mention of the word is regarded as taboo, with teachers reluctant to assign “Huckleberry Finn” and people’s careers reportedly ended for using the word even in quotation. But with “Ragtime,” short of never again reviving this epic musical, there is no way of getting around the word. No substitute word would ring true, and the scenes in which it’s spoken are too central to the plot to be coyly deleted. You have to, as it were, say Voldemort.
In simply using the word with no trigger warning, this production treated its audience as adults, able to understand that depicting a character who uses the word is not the same thing as condoning it. To the contrary, hearing it hurled in that emotionally charged setting was a reminder of just how chilling the word really is. I doubt that a single person was offended by the word’s inclusion, but if I’m wrong, I would bet quite a lot of money that person was white. Black people understand the word in context perfectly well.
Another current Broadway production — of the Thornton Wilder classic “Our Town” — is smart on race in a different way. Set in the same era as “Ragtime,” depicting life and death in humble small-town America, the play depicts two families, the Gibbs and the Webbs. In this production, the Webbs are as white as could be — they’re played by the “Waltons” alum Richard Thomas and the “Dawson’s Creek” star Katie Holmes. The Gibbses, however, written as white in the 1938 original, are Black. And not just in melanin, with Black actors playing what are intended as “white” characters (as in the recent “The Music Man” and, I continue to hope, in the upcoming “Gypsy”). Under the direction of Kenny Leon, who is Black himself, the Gibbses are culturally Black, too.
They lightly dust their line readings with Black speech cadences and sometimes even grammatical fillips that would be otherwise unknown in their New Hampshire hamlet. Plus, in keeping with the production’s clever, glancing anachronism, the Gibbses’ son George dresses like a Black teenager circa 1983. His white wedding tux summons Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, though his bride, Emily, wears a dress that wouldn’t be out of place in “Little House on the Prairie.”
None of this makes any historical sense, but after all, Wilder didn’t intend the play as documentary. The town, Grover’s Corners, is supposed to be Anywhere, America. And today, that America includes Blackness. A special glory of this production is that Ephraim Sykes as George and Zoey Deutch as Emily, despite being so different as types, have real chemistry. When they marry warmly to silky R&B, it feels right.
The theater world does still has some racial hangups. Barely a month goes by that I do not hear from a playwright (or novelist) somewhere in the United States who is having trouble getting a work produced because, I’m told, he or she is a white person writing about Black people. This is senseless. If people in power can’t artistically represent those with less, then Doctorow should not have written “Ragtime,” the book writer Terrence McNally shouldn’t have gone near the musical adaptation, and there should be no “Porgy and Bess.”
But if there’s so much progress visible in those two theaters I visited, why was so little of it visible in the results of the election, in which voters chose a man who has repeatedly denigrated Black people — with an especial fondness for calling us dumb — immigrants, Puerto Ricans and others?
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the students I was teaching at Columbia University were despondent. They felt that by voting for him, Americans had demonstrated their fundamental racism. I told the students that I, too, was appalled that Trump had been elected, but that it’s hasty to assume that only a racist could support him. A Trump voter might object to racism but not see it as a deal breaker. I mentioned white Trump voters I’ve known who have Black and Latino spouses, lovers, good friends.
The idea that liking Trump can only be understood in terms of racism is even less plausible this time around, with 13 percent of Black voters and almost every second Latino voter going for him. Black and Latino people are well aware of racism and its effects. They just didn’t all see it as a deal breaker.
That goes for reproductive rights, as well, since, as my colleague Pamela Paul notes, women “do not vote by uterus alone.” And immigration, an issue on which many Latinos side with Trump. And definitely as regards his almost willful lack of eloquence and propriety. To many, Trump’s bar stool gab sounds authentic, relatable. And as a Women for Trump organizer said in 2019, she didn’t “elect him to date my daughter or be my pastor — I elected him to turn the country around and right the ship.”
In 1920, H.L. Mencken predicted that “on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Mencken got the downright moron part right. But he was wrong about the heart’s desire. A great many voters were trying to balance their priorities, and just ended up in a very different place than I wish they had.
This does not make them moral descendants of the men who terrorized Coalhouse Walker. Insisting it does — as so many disappointed observers do — will only make the problem worse.
The post How a Shocking Insult Gave Me Reason to Hope appeared first on New York Times.
