Penumbra

By Stephanie Lein Walseth, August Wilson Fellow

Lein Walseth: What made you select this piece to be a part of your season, and how have you approached it?

Bellamy: I view theatre as having a purpose. I would have a tough time justifying spending all the time, effort and money if all I was doing was playing around with plays. The plays provide a space where the community can engage issues and think about things. I take the lead from the Black Arts movement that prescribed exactly what the role of an artist inside a community is, and I take that very seriously.

The idea of black people being used as gladiators, for entertainment, goes all the way back to slavery, and society has generally had sort of that function where that figure, a fighter, a wrestler, a track person, whatever, sort of takes on the clothes, becomes emblematic of a group in society. The idea is that it is less violent to have those two duke it out than to have the whole society duke it out. Because of the way we’ve structured professional sports and so forth, it’s the way many black males barter their body for an education. It was important for me to bring this before the community and ask them to think about it.

Lein Walseth: Has Penumbra ever done a script written by a white male? What bearing do you think this has on the work? Do you think it’s critical for this piece to have an African American director? To be done at an African American theatre company?

Bellamy: We did Neil Simon – we did a black and white Odd Couple in the second year of our existence. I think that the truth is the truth, perhaps no matter who tells it. But since the stage itself is a metaphor and you’re already a few steps away from reality, the farther you get from that portrayal of an ethos, the more dangerous it gets. That’s where a black director or a culturally-based person becomes of great worth. Whenever you step away from the reality and begin to “metaphorize” it, unless you’re sure, unless you’re grounded, then you get farther and farther away from truth. I think that is the worth of culturally-based artists, because they are grounded in the culture. You see, I don’t think race makes much difference. Culture makes all the difference in the world, however. There’s a cultural shorthand, a nuance, and that’s what I bring to a production that is unique. Unless you’re raised in that culture and know that shorthand, you can’t speak that way. You can try, but it’s stilted, and you don’t know the extent or the power of it.

I remember directing Angels in America. I had been around many, many gay men – my brother was one of the first sex changes in Minnesota, so I’ve been around it all my life. But I didn’t know the power of “snap.” I thought I knew it, but that was from an outsider viewing. When you get in there and really begin to understand what’s going on, and the way in which a marginalized culture reflects back the main culture’s morays, values, all that sort of stuff, changing it just a little for effect, it’s powerful. And that’s the way this culture can speak. And I think that Dana [Yeaton, the playwright] appreciates it, and I think that Blake [Robison, the Producing Artistic Director for Round House] appreciates it. When you see it, it’s not that you don’t understand it. I’m human, I can’t do anything that you don’t get--that doesn’t come out of you as well--but it’s twisted just a little, just enough, so that the signifiers are there, so that the ownership is there. It’s like tilting a hat. There’s a way in which one moves through the world culturally, and it has to do with posture, with the way you dip….it’s walking but it tells a different story. And there’s no way to write it down. So someone has to bring that to the piece.

Lein Walseth: So, as someone that’s culturally-based, and as the director, do you feel you’re able to bring that nuance? Is that where the synergy happens, between the written script and the live production?

Bellamy: Yeah. Dana did tremendous amounts of research, but he’s still viewing it through a window or a lens. He isn’t one that’s of that culture. He’s really observant, and I think intuitive, or else I wouldn’t be doing the play.

I was an undergrad psych major, and we used to do these things, or I read about them, called controlled twin studies. When they first starting doing those things, they thought the twins had the same environment, they thought they were holding the environment steady, and that was going to be the independent variable. It turns out that the other twin changes the environment significantly. So they cannot have the same environment. The presence of one being there alters the other’s reality. Dana knows what he knows when he’s in the room. He doesn’t know what happens when he’s not in the room. And I submit that something happens differently. It’s like men writing about women. You know, I know what women say when I’m around. I don’t know what they say when I’m not around. And it is different, isn’t it? I think that is what I’m charged with bringing to this.

I’m also charged with placing it inside of a wider cultural, racial context because I know what black athletes, or what their parents are thinking when they’re there; how they’re used. And I’m bringing all that sort of thing to it as well. For instance, when one of those boys says, “My mother’s gonna kill me,” for some behavior or something, I’m the one who will be talking to his mother. I’ve had that experience. And I will do it on campus now. And I’ve gotten in trouble because of it. I will say, because of the privacy thing, I’ll say to a student “Does your mother know what you’re doing here? I’m gonna tell her.” You know, because I’m old black, and that’s what you do. You say, “You know man, I’ll take care of you. I’m gonna have your mother in here.” And then, you know, they get it. They go “Okay. Yes sir, yes sir.” You know, they don’t want that momma in there on their ass. Those are the things that you just have to be raised in the culture to understand.

Lein Walseth: So, can you talk about the larger cultural context that this play is working within? From among all of the myriad issue that this play raises, is there one at the core for you within this cultural context?

Bellamy: I think that what we have done in America is we have overemphasized this role of sports. That isn’t any sort of revelation. I think anybody could come to that and say, “This is kinda out of whack.” I was looking at this young man who got the baseball that Barry Bonds hit out when he broke the homerun record, and he fell upon the ball and people were kicking him in the head to make him drop the ball so they could have it. You know, come on, this is a baseball.

The reason sports are connected to the university goes back to the Greeks, where they felt that you had to educate or develop the entire being, and so they didn’t want these egghead bandy-legged brains. You had to be smart and you had to be physical, and all gymnasium is about that. And so, that’s the linkage that should be there.

Because we want to win so badly, these young African American men are separated out when they’re 5 or 6 years old, and they start sidetracking them and sending them on a different thing. Perhaps it’s just specialization. I don’t know. But, what you end up getting is young men who are physically threatening, powerful, and able, and we neglect that socialization in many cases that make them responsible human beings. Because culturally there are some things that are important to blacks, like basketball let’s say, these kids are sidetracked and the rest of their development is sort of muted while this basketball thing goes on. And no one cares that there are 500 kids that are trying to get there. All the recruiters want is one good one. So, 500 kids go by the wayside. They don’t get any schooling, they can just bounce a basketball.

So, this play begins to get at that nexus between athleticism in the college setting and intellectual development. When money gets in it, I think all you need to do is look at salaries. And that’s public information, you can get them at the University of Minnesota. You can see the priorities of the institution by looking at the professors’ salaries. You can go over to the med school, and then go over to theatre arts. It tells you about what they perceive as being worth something. These coaches are making 2 million dollars a year. Perhaps they’re worth that. I don’t know. I think a plumber might be worth more if you need one badly.

For the black athlete, the game is to barter physical prowess for an education. At least, that used to be the game. Now the game seems to be to audition while on a field at a college for the pros. See the shift?

Lein Walseth: Dana talked about part of the impetus of this play being the bringing together of two words and worlds that you rarely see in conjunction – theatre and football. Any thoughts on that?

Bellamy: Putting sports on stage has been done. For me it’s more about social commentary. I think that Lance, the scenic designer, has done some wonderful things in bringing the feel of that arena, that idea of gladiatorish, hyperextended, it pulls way back to a vanishing point, so it just charges at you in a kind of way. I think the script demands it and I think his design helps that out.

Lein Walseth: Is this piece in any way connected to your life experience? If so, how?

Bellamy: I wasn’t gifted like that, but yeah, I ran track in high school and college and was in gymnastics and many of my friends have been athletes. I’ve always been around it. For me, girls changed all that. There were more girls in drama than there were in track. They’re way more fun. So that’s what got me out of it.

Selection of the school that I went to had to do with meeting the coach. And curiously enough, not with the head of the psych department or the sociology department. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to major in. I started out in biochemistry. But I knew that I was going to run track. The choice would have been made for me whether I made it or not, because I just wasn’t that good. But when you really are, and your education depends on your ability to keep healthy, not be injured, and do all that sort of stuff, it’s a tremendous strain. I remember coming home and having a paper due in English and I could not write. I couldn’t hold the pen because I was shaking from practice. So, just physically, there’s a competition there.

I appreciated especially for young black males, and increasingly females as Title 9 has come along and women’s sports are beginning to make money, you’re seeing the same sort of culling.

Lein Walseth: Do you see this play as a call to action? How is this part of Penumbra’s belief in the power of art to affect social change?

Bellamy: I don’t have to say what I want the community to do with it. In fact, I think that makes for bad art. What I do have to do is put truthful situations on stage that provoke the audience, and give them enough of a tinge of reality so that people will take the outcomes on stage as emblematic or indicative of real life. It should spur them, get them engaged emotionally, and then get them to jump in and out of an intellectual decision. That’s the best kind of art. The audience is pulled to it, they’re into it, and then they go “Oh my god.” That’s what I hope the piece will do. Then afterwards, I think that there are all sorts of resonators that should kick into intellectual examination after that emotional connection was made. Beckett, Brecht, they do this thing, they don’t want you emotionally engaged. There’s this ‘alienation effect,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. I prefer that emotional involvement because if you’re in that intellectual place, you’re in too much control. I want to wrest that control from them and make them go to a place they might not have gone. Because we’re too smart. How many times have you seen a movie and you say “I don’t feel like crying today.” You make an intellectual decision. So I want to catch them. In fact, I think audiences are happiest when you mix as many of those emotions as you can. Get ‘em crying, and then make them laugh while they’re crying. Right in the middle, so they have to wipe their face, and they’re thrilled by it, they love it. I love it. So you want to mix those things up. Because you never know what humans will do with that mix. We don’t know, all we do is mix them up.

Lein Walseth: While researching for this play, what surprised you the most? How about thus far in the rehearsal process – what has surprised you there?

Bellamy: The power of the language really surprised me. The flat-out craft of the playwright. I thought I had this play really compartmentalized, that I knew what it was. And I got in there and I see some of the stuff he was manipulating, the stylistic kind of decisions that the text forces you to make. When Dante comes out and does those raps in there, it mixes and breaks this reality plane consistently, and has that alienation effect. It also makes him, at the same time that he has all this physical prowess, it adds a kind of, well verse, generally makes somebody smart. It adds an intellectual dimension that I did not know that was there until it got on its feet. Theatre is always more than you thought it was going to be. It always surprises us.

Lein Walseth: How do you see this play as fitting into the framework of this season, which also marks the beginning of Penumbra’s 5-year undertaking of August Wilson’s 10 play cycle? Do you find it resonant or dissonant? How so? Why this play, why now?

Bellamy: What an Artistic Director does is to live life fully with one fist in the air. And when I say fully I mean not prophylactically, I mean dirty, getting stuff on you. Somehow that translates into an artistic outcome. You know, after this interview, something may happen here, and it just plagues me, and I have to talk about it. The way I talk about it is on stage. And that’s what Artistic Director’s do. That’s why everyone’s seasons should be different.

This idea of blacks in sports and in college, I’ve been worrying about it for a while. Because it is the entree for so many poor people – they’ve got a body, you know. And that body can be used for many things – slavery, to plant cotton, to pull barges, to barter, for football. And that’s what I want to interrogate. I want to make sure, because it’s a big trade. Because you’ve got one back that gets broken, one neck, and all these kinds of things, and that’s all you get, is that one chance at it. So you want to be sure whatever rewards you might get at the end of the rainbow are worth taking that chance. I’m not sure that many young people really understand it. I want somebody to think about it. I’d like parents to think about it. When you think how much potential is lost, I don’t know how many NFL or NBA slots there are, there may be 1,500. All these kids are trying to get to be in one of those 1,500. My god, their chances are better at being a doctor, at going to medical school, than they are to making it into professional sports. So look at what’s being wasted.

We talk about this raging anti-intellectualism in the United States. We’re rewarding them for that kind of thinking. It goes even deeper, because when those people go into whatever business they’re going to go into, they become the stewards for the society. They become the elders, eventually, of that society. They’re not equipped, because what they’re reinforced for is physical prowess, being able to bash their heads together and this sort of thing, while other people are being reinforced for intellectualism and personal development. Those are the things that make for a strong society. Not just sports. And so we go around and we say ‘How come there aren’t blacks contributing to the arts the way that we’d like them to do?’ Well, they haven’t been trained. So, the cost of skewing your reality toward sports and those kinds of things is way more than just the individual. The society at large just doesn’t get the benefit of what is lost.

Lein Walseth: Can you talk about how this piece deals with the reconciliation between the individual and the community in a broader sense?

Bellamy: Look for a minute at these sports figures, you look at these young men and someone will say, the coach will say “You’ve got to conduct yourself a certain way if you’re going to be on this team. I want you to look a certain way..” and the players say, “Man, I don’t want to be anybody’s role model.” Well, I don’t know. If you’re going to do Nike commercials, then maybe you are, then maybe there is a responsibility there. Look for instance at Michael Vick’s career. This guy fights pit bulls. And his life is ruined, his professional football life is ruined because of something that had absolutely nothing to do with that. They are special, whether or not they like that, they are. I don’t know whether we have a right to expect a different kind of conduct from them. I think it has to do with a certain kind of balance. And that balance is all out of whack. The individual vs. the community or society, that’s what a team sport is supposed to teach. That’s one of the arguments of people making for Title 9. Women never had the opportunity to create team type relationships. I think it has great potential to be used by educators. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

You will hear intellectuals talk about situation ethics, where the situation determines the ethical response. Rather than a list of things that are ethical. And that’s a relativism that many would chafe at but I think that often as your economic level may get lower, those kinds of decisions come against each other more often. Is it better to not eat or to steal this crust of bread? Is the structure of the society so already made putrid and non-functional for such a large group that they disregard the morays of the society because there’s no way to satisfy Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by staying within the lines? There’s no way. For instance, if someone wants their child to go to school. Well, they can’t do that if they have no education and they’re at McDonald’s. You know, Raisin in the Sun, Walter Lee. He wants so much to be a capitalist. But he’s not trained to be a capitalist. He has no experience, so he makes dumb mistakes. So cheating to keep a comrade eligible, because he’s a good blocker and he’s going to be able to let you run farther and then get picked up by the pros or whatever, the situation demands a different kind of ethical response.

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