Race & Privilege: Asheville Playback Theatre Starts a Community Conversation

Cast of Playback Theater’s “Let’s Talk About Race.” Seated: Mountaine Mort Jonas, Ike Sloan. Standing: Brian Jaudon, Kim Christman, Linda Metzner, Deborah Scott, Raphael Peter, Emily Lower, Daniel Barber, Jessica Chilton, Michael Beveridge, and Joy Hodges.

From Staff Reports

Asheville Playback Theatre is tackling one of the toughest and most important issues the Asheville community faces with its March 16 show titled, “Let’s Talk About Race and Privilege.” The performance will take place Sunday at 7:00 p.m. at the NC Stage Company, off Walnut Street opposite Zambra’s.
The freedom to approach tough subjects is inherent in the way Playback performances work. They’re interactive theatre in which a member of the audience tells a story and the actors spontaneously perform it back to them. The story can be complicated or simple, happy or sad, emotional or dramatic – just as people’s lives are.

As company
co-director Deb Scott puts it, “If you say, ‘I’m feeling rather tired
today,’ that can be a story. It can stop there, or it can be explored
further.” The actors might want to learn why the teller is tired,
whether it’s a physical or mental exhaustion (or both), if specific
incidents have brought you down, and so forth.

Playback
companies use a combination of open-ended spontaneity with established
forms and structure. After listening closely to a story, they quickly,
silently determine the mood, style, and approach they will use. Then
they deliver a fully realized performance using the most minimal tools:
pieces of fabric as representative costume items, music, movement, and
other acting techniques.

In some
ways Playback is similar to the work of griots, the West African poets,
musicians, and bards who are considered a repository of oral tradition.
According to Paul Oliver in his book “Savannah Syncopators”, “Though
[the griot] has to know many traditional songs without error, he must
also have the ability to extemporize on current events . . .” Many also
use their wit and knowledge for social comment.

Scott
considers “starting the conversation” essential to bringing about
change, which Asheville Playback accomplishes by inviting others to
speak and listening to what they have to say. “What happens in Playback
performances,” says Scott, “if the magic works, is the creation of a
safe space where people can be heard.”

Asheville
Playback has appeared in many spaces, including the YMI Cultural Center
and the Stephens Lee Community Center, and the group performs regularly
in area prisons. The company has also done quite a bit of work with
adjudicated and at-risk youth. A year ago the company was asked to give
a special performance to address the concerns of an ad-hoc group of
mental health consumers. Some followed traditional treatment paths,
others felt that they were looking at a broken system.”

“They’d
had it,” says Scott. “We brought together those consumers with service
providers and even some administrators. There was healing for each
group, a tremendous amount of learning and exchange.”

During
last year’s season, she adds, “each show had a theme that was
provocative, but not necessarily grounded in current politics or
specific to Asheville issues. So when we were planning for this year’s
season, we thought, ‘Why not harness a hot topic that’s specific to
Asheville?’”

Five
members, including Scott, had visited Atlanta last fall for the U.S.
Social Forum, a national gathering of grassroots organizations. The
forum brought activists together from highly diverse communities, and
while Asheville Playback has had two African American members,
currently the sixteen-person company is all white. “We asked ourselves
what work we could do [in order to] represent really diverse stories?
And we partnered with a company from the Ashé Cultural Center
(www.ashecac.org) in New Orleans, and a member of a Filipino group from
San Francisco, a Chinese American woman from Oakland, a woman from
Brooklyn…”

Coincidentally,
company founder Raphael Peter had been hearing from a black friend that
“the community is losing heart. She was saying, ‘People talk, but
nothing changes.’ And my response was, ‘That’s what Playback is about!
Playback companies all over deal with social justice, human rights
issues.’”

In
planning the current season, the members had coalesced around a focus
on Community Concerns. One issue that emerged was the privileges that
one race gains at the expense of others.

Among
those privileges is the right to be heard; one of the fundamental
complaints of every disempowered group is being ignored. “Listen to me.
Pay attention to me,” demand the oppressed. And nobody does.

The actors in Playback do listen, and they hear. It seemed like a perfect fit to Raphael Peter.

“Our
overarching theme is “building a community of neighbors,” and the
foundation of Playback is to honor your story,” he says. “One of the
key things we’ve learned is how the participants begin to develop
listening skills. And what I’ve learned in Building Bridges is that
people of color just want to be heard. So this performance is the
perfect opportunity for people to be heard.”

Asheville
Playback Theatre will perform at the NC Stage Company’s performance
space on Stage Lane off Walnut Street. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5
for students and seniors, but no one will be turned away for lack of
resources. For more information call 828-670-5881 or visit
globalplayback.org. The company is an affiliate member of the
International Playback Theatre Network, which has member companies in
more than 35 countries.