At the opening of Full Color, Plan-B Theatre’s 34th season opener, the setting is pleasant and inviting: eight people enjoying each other’s company and feeling comfortable at home, outside a tent in nature. As each person shares a story, the production’s epiphany expands organically, one narrative at a time. While the audience is welcomed to listen, the expectations for us in this ingeniously curated theatrical experience mean resisting the comfort of being passive or colorblind and acknowledging contemporary realities of systemic biases, discrimination and racism. In plain words, “One cannot fight what one does not see.”
Full Color pops with heart, wit, poetry, intellectual depth and soul-bearing emotion. It is the third in the company’s Color Series productions featuring work by members of Plan-B’s Theatre Artists of Color Writing Workshop. As noted in The Utah Review preview, the production comprises short first-person monologues by eight BIPOC playwrights who reflect on their experiences in Utah. However, instead of the playwrights performing the monologues they have written, the performances are entrusted to their own doppelgänger — actors who relate, identify and can sincerely testify to the gist of the experiences and the stories the playwrights have put into their script.
The actors excel in their creative task, who compel us to realize that if we do not see color in its fullness, we also fail to see how racism and discrimination continue in our neighborhoods, our schools and in our own lives. Each story stands on its own merit for its narrative impact but what makes Full Color especially good is the finely woven threads that tie the entire package of eight monologues together. This is not just a compilation of eight anecdotes but a comprehensive, multilayered testimony to how widespread and far reaching the experiences of BIPOC Utahns occur in virtually every domain. The order of performance sharpens the connections among the eight monologues, particularly in the latter half of offerings that reinforce the point that such experiences are not anomalous or singular by any measure.
Dee-Dee Darby-Duffin’s monologue, Fried Chicken, springs from an encounter at the hot food deli counter of a grocery store in Salt Lake City’s well-known and well-heeled Ninth and Ninth neighborhood, when a cashier mistakes her debit card, which has a University of Utah logo, for an EBT (electronic benefit transfer) card. The cashier loudly announces that the hot chicken fingers Darby-Duffin is trying to purchase are not eligible for purchase by using EBT. Yolanda Stange nails Darby-Duffin’s voice as a playwright in acting out the monologue. Instead of letting her mistake vanish benignly, the cashier takes a more embarrassing tack that reveals more about her than she realizes. Fried Chicken’s humor is spicy but it sets up the takeaway about dignity and respect for those who earnestly make it work on a fixed income, despite the stereotypical stigma that many people have etched into their not-sublty-racist minds.
Likewise, Abyanna Wood captures the poetic heart in Here by Courtney Dilmore, which flows with a gentle, spiritual and meditative tone on the sense of pride and identity when a young person reconnects to their Native American roots, which rejuvenates them with fresh confidence to “walk in tow worlds again.” She has returned to the reservation, a trip that took seven hours, and initially, she finds it too quiet almost to the point of feeling lonely, as she peels potatoes and keeps an eye on her grandmother whose memory and other faculties are slipping away with age. The reservation is so isolated that there is only one FM radio station that can be clearly heard. She had come here at the behest of her mother, who instinctively knew what she needed to stop having sleepless nights, where she woke up worried that she had forgotten to do something or an upcoming event. As she writes, “Let the land heal you, she said in a lot more words. I didn’t argue. Didn’t have any excuses nor the strength to fight her, I mean when the matriarch speaks, you listen.”
Every actor mirrors their playwright’s voice with utmost conviction. Pedro Flores extracts the full incisive punch from Let’s Not by Tito Livas.The monologue opens by re-enacting a voicemail message from his agent, who tells him that while the client thought that he had an excellent audition, they decided to pass because he was “too good-looking for this project.” Channeling Livas, Flores makes the impassioned case that being called “too good-looking” is anything but a flattering comment, as it is really code, and not even in an innocuous context, for “your skin has too much melanin.” The monologue highlights an unexpectedly hopeful outcome from the COVID-19 shutdowns that opened a channel for “difficult conversations addressing comments like ‘he’s just too good-looking’ to try and justify racist casting, as well as broader challenges to rectifying inequities in the arts and entertainment worlds.
Photo Credit: Sharah Meservy.
I Still Have To Live Here by Tatiana Christian is one of the most intelligent reflections I have seen of late on contemporary American politics. Talia Heiss strikes the right cadence in bringing us into the layers and complexities of identity politics and the less-than-effective impact of performative politics. Heiss builds nicely in capturing Christian’s illuminating perspective on a personal epiphany that emerged through a deep probe of books and readings, notably from Black conservatives: “Black liberals and white liberals are two sides of the same coin.” Christian deftly condenses what for some others might have ended up as a lengthy peroration into a persuasively lucid summary of her intellectual journey. She had left the Twitter platform (now known as X) disillusioned, thinking that her departure would be good for her intellectual well-being. Heiss heightens Christian’s realization of how regularly instances of oblivious tones, microaggressions, subtle and not-so-accidental encounters with racism, especially from sources whom one might not expect to act in such a manner, continue to occur.
As skillfully as Stange, Terence Johnson teases out the humor in American Survival Story by Darryl Stamp, which also has passing reference to the same grocery chain in Darby-Duffin’s story but in a different neighborhood. Stamp always has had a natural flair for comedy and that is evidenced when Johnson introduces his monologue with an ironic observation during last year’s Trick or Treat activities for Halloween in the playwright’s Bountiful, Utah neighborhood, where he is the only Black resident. An eight-year-boy came to his door, dressed as a police officer. “It was a granular moment of residual trauma about the people hired to protect and serve,” Stamp writes, adding, “It was a cute costume, but the irony wasn’t lost on me.” As he relates, he had never been pulled over and profiled by police until he moved to Bountiful, and it has happened to him twice. But, as a well-placed segue from Christian’s I Still Have to Live Here, Stamp’s accounting of numerous examples trace a survival story, accompanied by a lesson about the fully justified concerns of forgetting a past juxtaposed with the present, knowing that historical erasure continues now but in a seemingly kinder and gentle manner that actually is deceptive.
Photo Credit: Sharah Meservy.
Life is Color by Iris Salazar is a gorgeous centerpiece that ties directly to the seven other monologues. It is a finely written poetic argument against a colorblind approach that has tangible consequences that confound progress toward genuine equality. With wonderful lyricism, Estephani Cerros briskly walks us through a finely curated summation of all of the ways we reference colors in every aspect of communication and life, Salazar remembers how her parents “referred to me as a ‘prieta,’ a term of endearment referring to my beautiful brownness, emphasized with love in their voices. That is how I learned to love, walk, and never feel ashamed of my colors.” Colors are not just descriptive labels for literary and creative purposes but they can be double-edged in purpose: as labels of empowerment when individuals proudly own them as a sign of their heritage and identity or as weapons of disparagement when used against individuals. To imagine, assume or evaluate one’s holistic experience based on color is at best a general starting point of extremely,limited importance amd discovery.
Fox and the Mormons by Chris Curlett deftly amplifies points from Livas’s Let’s Not and Stamp’s American Survival Story. Alex Smith does full justice to the razor quality of the monologue. Curlett brings us quickly into his effectively titled true-life fable, as a young Los Angeles man transported to a world of theater shadowed by the ubiquitous LDS presence: “But, you see, when you’re a man of color, Utah can be a tricky place. Ensemble roles, trauma porn shows when you finally get showcased, but in shackles.” Placed immediately after Salazar’s effective anchoring of the production theme, Curlett’s personal account rounds out, in proper rhythm, the takeaways from Livas and Stamp, while clearly attaching the experiences of Darby-Duffin and Dilmore, with standing in two worlds.
Smith really shines in the section that ingeniously sets up the parallel between Curlett’s fable and the classic Aesop story of The Fox and The Grapes: “But try as it might, the fox couldn’t reach them. The fox desired those juicy, tantalizing grapes, but no matter how hard he tried, they remained out of reach.” Curlett forges this with striking clarity and harmony, adding his own twist. That is, the character of The Hunter. Like Utahns, even those whose LDS ties have been separated, the welcome sign and expressions of “we appreciate you” can be good enough to lure someone in, only to realize the insincerity that masks the trap.
The closing monologue, At Least One by Bijan J. Hosseini, properly shocks us out of apathy to consider the alarming persistence of some of the most insidious and dangerous acts of racism. As with Stamp, Hosseini sets his monologue up with encounters of being pulled over and profiled by law enforcement personnel. Hosseini’s monologue actually could be performed with two actors, even though one effectively encapsulates the dramatic exchange has chronicled. There are, in fact, accounts of encounters for the Persian-Okinawa playwright: not only with a stop by police but also being subjected to the humiliating profiling experience by TSA officials at the airport.
For this monologue, the seven other actors step off the stage and sit in aisles flanking the theater. It is an important move because our eyes have nowhere to hide, as Alec Kalled fully inhabits Hosseini’s monologue. It is an exceptional performance: the manifestation of the line that “one cannot fight what one does not see.” Hosseini’s monologue is structured in a manner that is different when considered in its whole form than those of the seven playwrights who preceded him. But, in the counterpoint of exchanges recalled from what happened roadside and at the airport, one can see how every one of the seven monologues that have preceded this one set the path leading to the final sentence in At Least One.
Full Color welcomes the audience to an opportunity for cultural humility and to stop pretending that we don’t see color but instead to dig deeper into these stories of lived experiences and learn more about forging genuine connections and ending systemic racism.
Directed by Jerry Rapier, the production continues through Nov. 10 in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts in downtown Salt Lake City. Performances will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 30; Friday, Nov. 1; Thursday, Nov. 7; Friday, Nov. 8, as well as on Saturdays at 4 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets and more information, see the Plan-B Theatre website.
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