Clay Shirky, associate member of the Wooster Group and founding member of the New York-based Hard Place Theater, is clearly a man who loves stirring things up. In his last theater piece, Excerpts From the Attorney General’s Report on Pornography, which Hard Place performed in conjunction with Bailiwick Repertory and City Lit Theater last summer, Shirky took a flawed, biased, lacunae-filled government-commission report–a text many doubted could have been translated to the stage–and transformed it into a fascinating, intelligent, entertaining, and infuriating piece of theater that examined the subject of pornography (and the commission’s assumptions) more thoroughly than the commission itself did.
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This year Shirky, in residence at the Bailiwick, collaborated with the Chicago-based African American director Tanya White on a piece provocatively entitled A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Methods Used to Create and Maintain a Segregated Society. Like Excerpts, this piece is a nonnarrative work that incorporates a collage of disparate texts, a panoply of contradictory voices, jokes and opinions, commission reports, black-power raps, and right-wing ravings. The resulting rich, theatrical tapestry aims to deconstruct the issue of race relations in America in general and Chicago in particular. And like Excerpts, A Preliminary Inquiry leaves no sacred cow ungored. Liberals and conservatives, blacks and whites, multiculties and neoconservatives alike will all find something to hate in this show.
“Smile on your brother,” Shirky interjects, his voice dripping with irony.
Last August, when Excerpts was playing at Bailiwick, Shirky approached executive director David Zak about creating a show built around Amnesty International’s 1990 report on police brutality in Chicago. Zak liked the idea but confided that he had problems with having a white director come to Chicago from New York to do a piece about segregation.
Shirky pauses a moment, and White continues his thought: “Things just aren’t resolved. People in the cast hate it.”
