The Shipment

Firehall Arts Centre until October 5, 2019
Tickets from $20 at firehallartscentre.ca or 604-689-0926

Posted September 27, 2019

I agree with playwright Young Jean Lee when she said in a recent CBC interview, “I really have a hard time watching that show now”. Her comment was in response to interviewer Tom Power asking if she sees The Shipment, written in 2009, differently now. “Yeah”, it was “pre-Obama”, she said, and she does feel that our sensitivity to racial stereotyping is evolving. (Case in point: the cross-Canada outrage over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appearing blackface in 2002.)

The Shipment comes out of the American, not the Canadian, experience although Power, in the interview, commented that Canadians frequently and smugly congratulate themselves on their racial tolerance.

Lee, born in South Korea but brought to Pullman, Washington as a two-year-old, is celebrated as “the queen of unease” and she’s okay with that. Her intention is to be provocative, to shake things up and in her words, “destroy the audience.” I wasn’t destroyed but I was intrigued not only with the content but how it was created.

The Shipment began when Lee got together with five black actors and put herself “in the service of them” as a playwright. What did they want to say? The first part of the piece attacks black stereotyping – roles in which black actors are constantly and stereotypically being cast. But, says Lee, “When you satirize or comment on [stereotypes] they can still easily turn into stereotypes, kind of perpetuating them when you’re trying to critique them. I was really nervous about that but [the actors] were pretty adamant that this was something they wanted to address.”

I was pretty nervous about that, too, sitting in the Firehall Arts Centre with the audience laughing all around me at what begins, basically, as a minstrel-style, stand-up comedy routine laced with “muthuh-fuckuh” this and that. The shock value has gone so what’s left is an animated, almost force-fed, hilarious (to some) rant. Omari Newton busts his buns getting laughs – and he gets them – at the expense of both blacks and whites . “White people are evil”,  gets great laughs”, for example. Playwright Lee is right when she suggests audiences don’t know whether to laugh or not. Best part of Newton’s schtick is when the act falls away and he tells us, with affecting candour, “I have a white wife and I love her.” Not that she’s white but that he has a wife, he loves her and finds it important to tell us. His sweet candour blew me away.

The next scene is a more highly choreographed, almost robotic story of young black boy Omar (Andrew Creightney) whose mother wants him to be a doctor but who only wants to be a rapper. He doesn’t want to be a drug dealer but one thing leads to another. Enter a pistol-packing mama (Kiomi Pyke) and assorted bad guys. What follows is a five-part, soul-wrenching acapella rendition of Modest Mouse’s “Dark Centre of The Universe” with the refrain, “Well I might/Disintegrate into the thin air if you like/And I’m not/The dark center of the universe like you thought.” Chilling.

The third scene was created by the actors in response to Lee’s question, if not these stereotypical roles, what roles would they like to play. The outcome of that is an awkward party from hell with one guest (Chris Francisque) advising his host (Omari Newton), “no alcohol, no dairy, no meat, no fish, no grains. . . . ” It’s like the worst dinner party you’ve ever been to. Everyone is freaky especially Adrian Neblett as one of the guests.

Co-directed by Kayvon Khoshkam and Omari Newton, and presented by SpeakEasy Theatre, The Shipment left me thinking – and that’s always a good thing. I share playwright Lee’s worry that in satirizing black stereotypes, The Shipment might inadvertently be perpetuating them – just as Clockwork Orange unintentionally encouraged violence amongst the already unhinged.

The most challenging and exciting moment in this production is the longest, silent, face-to-face stare-down between actors and audience that I have ever experienced in the theatre. What did I feel? Guilt? Sorrow? Empathy? All of the above? I’m still processing. . . .