‘Rose in America’ is an urgent script not yet in full bloom
Michelle Carter’s “Rose in America,” now in an AlterTheater world premiere production, is very close to being the play about race and identity politics that we desperately need right now.
The first scene takes place on the first day of a “performance practicum” (i.e., a student-led grad school class) in a dance, theater and performance studies program, with students Tisha (Nkechi Emeruwa) and Kemi (AeJay Mitchell) bandying about terms like “reconstructivist” and “transcontextual” as if they were everyday speech.
“Rose in America” is also steeped in history — theatrical history, the history of the gay movement, civil rights history.
The three students get inspiration for their culminating project from the 1965 play “Rose in the Jungle,” about Viola, a white woman from Detroit who travels to the South to support blacks during the march from Selma and gets killed by the KKK.
(“Rose in the Jungle” is fictional, but is loosely basd on the murder of Viola Liuzzo.) They take it apart and add their own material, including movement, song and interviews with the historical figures who inspired the play’s characters, weaving it all together and performing the resulting play-within-a-play in a heightened, non-naturalistic manner that interrogates the very troubling aspects of “Rose in the Jungle”: its white savior narrative, its stereotypical Sambo character, its elision of the people who made the sacrifices that made Viola’s sacrifice possible.
Not Wally for implying that, because he’s gay, he understands what it’s like to be black; not Jack for insisting that his good intentions and credentials — he teaches at a predominantly black school — make him an equally legitimate participant in any conversation about race; not Anthony for performing and brandishing the role of working class hero and forcing his definition of blackness onto others; and not Tisha and Kemi for their privilege, their blindness to the past activism that made possible their ivory tower version of social justice.
Through June 19 at ACT’s Costume Shop, 1117 Market St., S.F. June 22-July 3 at TBA downtown San Rafael storefront. $25-$40. www.altertheater.org (lman2)