JOE MOMMA!
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Ron Mark takes a stab at this issue in Joe Momma!, but he gets tangled up in stereotypes, platitudes, wishful thinking, and gooey sentimentality. Set in the teachers’ lounge of a school on Chicago’s south side during the tumultuous 1967-’68 school year, the play attempts to expose the tensions between two Jewish teachers and their black counterparts. Ziggy Razzowitz is a fawning, nerdy new teacher who thinks black people are just soooo cool. “Hey, I got to learn all those words, all that black culture,” he says breathlessly to a dashiki-clad black teacher named Tubuku. But Tubuku won’t even talk to Ziggy. Instead, a less strident black teacher, Rudy Waddles, attempts to transform Ziggy into a “blue eye”–ghetto slang for “a honkie with soul.” He tells Ziggy to stop dressing like a Christmas tree, in outlandish combinations of plaids and stripes, and to walk with the fluid, bouncing gait known as a pimp roll. But Ziggy is a slow learner. “Who’s this Joe Momma?” he asks, misunderstanding the students’ ubiquitous taunt.
Ziggy keeps trying to learn the ways of black society, however, because he is lusting after a sexy black teacher named Zaharah Tiffany, who barely even notices him. Meanwhile, Lucy Capone, a sexually repressed white teacher, is secretly in love with Tubuku–she has disturbing dreams about a black snake wriggling around inside of her. The guilt aroused in her by such “sinful” feelings is driving her toward a nervous breakdown.
