A PRELIMINARY INQUIRY INTO THE METHODS USED TO CREATE AND MAINTAIN A SEGREGATED SOCIETY
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The resolutely balanced cooperation behind this production contrasts notably with the hostility and confusion that dominate the content, which ranges from the rhetoric of white racists and black militants to ingenuous pronouncements by politicians and pop singers. Much of it’s presented in random and chaotic fashion, inadvertently illustrating the murky misunderstanding that continues to bolster American-style apartheid. The result is instructive but irritating; despite the mass of statistics and other facts that fill this hour-long, intermissionless show, the overall effect is bewilderment. Problems, not solutions.
Indeed, the few suggestions of hopefulness that pop up are repudiated by blunt, sometimes sophomoric irony. The Carpenters’ sentimental ballad “We’ve Only Just Begun,” sung as the show’s opener, is delivered as a smug send-up of the interracial vocal group Up With People (the singers’ incongruously vulgar hip thrusts seem to embody every anxiety any white parent ever had about integrated education). The anthem “We Shall Overcome” is rendered with an air of near-despair. And a police training manual whose aim is to warn white cops against stereotyping blacks as criminals is acted out in a cartoonish, street-theater style that mocks blacks and whites, police and civilians alike.
