Female and Minority Issues Find Stage Outlet

A very pregnant black woman struts angrily across a spartan stage, her pink terry-cloth bathrobe barely large enough to fit around her protruding stomach.

“If I had a white picket fence I would have gone to school every day since I was four years old,” she says, her hands resting briefly on her womb.

“I had a choice to have sex? That’s bullshit.”

Kristy M. Johnson ’02 outlines a series of regrets, frustrations and desires in her role as a future teenage mom in the short skit, “Choice.” Instead of framing the abortion debate in its typical terms—as a choice between life or death—abortion becomes an economic, social and racial issue as well.

But nothing in this weekend’s student-written, student-directed Women In Color Project follows according to expectation. The 19-odd monologues, poems and skits discuss a broad array of issues facing young women in America.

Though the show is dubbed Women In Color, it is more than a hodgepodge of skits about different racial and ethnic groups to showcase issues of identity. Instead, Women In Color aims to be a cohesive attempt to bring issues that are often ignored by standard theater productions, such as street harrassment and interracial dating, to the Harvard stage.

The production, written by a group of 13 women between last spring and October, was written by the Women In Color campus group, a political and social forum to connect women of various ethnicities.

Scenes are race-specific: “Nuance” and “Asian American Shattered” both deal with ranges of skin tone among blacks and Asians.

But co-director Terry E. Chang ’02 said the common experience of being a minority in American links the disparate scenes together.

“There are a lot of the same themes and problems that manifest themselves in different cultures,” Chang said.

But the cast of 23 women and one man, many of whom have never appeared on stage before, are challenged with provoking complexes which an audience is likely to find intensely personal, regardless of individual race or ethnicity, Co-Director Taii K. Bullock ’02 said.

And for some of the actors, many of whom are appearing in skits or poems they’ve actually written, the parallels between life and the stage are often indistinguishable.

In “Black Enough,” Stephanie J. Dorvil ’05 plays a black girl coming of age in a mostly-white community.

Dorvil herself grew up in a Miami community without many other blacks.

“I have to remember to detach myself a little bit because I get so caught up in the words,” Dorvil said.

The Women In Color Project, however, is fraught with various performance risks.

In an effort to remain an experimental theater group, Chang and Bullock did not go through common casting.

Instead, their open casting call brought them a largely underclass, mostly inexperienced troupe.

The directors also have student-writers acting in their own plays.

“While the writing is not necessarily not as good because it’s not as professional, it kept getting revised,” said Julia H. Fawcett ’04, Women In Color writer, actor and producer.

For production help, Women In Color teamed with the Athena Theater Group, an all-women’s production company of which Fawcett is president. Although the show is a source of pride for both groups, the show has been short-handed.

“There is a dearth of tech people at Harvard, and there are even fewer women who do tech,” Julia Reischel ’04, Athena producer said. “I have had to teach people from scratch.”

There’s also the concern of women-theater-overload. Women In Color and the Vagina Monologues both share a theater (the Agassiz), a production company (Athena) and the same weekend (Feb. 15-17).

Shawn D. Parker ’02, the only man in the Women In Color Project, does not think the estrogen will overwhelm the production’s success.

“At first, it was a little strange to come to rehearsal,” Parker said. Based on his experiences, he found himself wondering if any women were happy.

But he was quick to highlight that the Women in Color Project is in no way an attack on men.

“It does highlight some of the negative things that do exist about men but the message isn’t all grey.”

theater

Women in Color Project

Athena Theater Company

Written by Women in Color Campus Group

Directed by Terry E. Chang ’02,

Taii K. Bullock ’02

At the Agassiz Theater

Feb. 15–17