Here is the important stuff:
The Westmont Festival Theater has established a bold new program, the Initiative for Justice and Global Engagement, and has installed the ebullient and gifted Johnny Jones, writer and director, as its first Artist/Scholar-in-Residence.
For the opening act of his new position, Jones will produce “NEXUS,” three staged Readings from Black Playwrights that “explore diversity, equity and inclusion.”
The first of these readings, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Gloria,” will take the stage in Porter Theater (Westmont Campus) at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 25. The series of readings, will include post-reading discussions, and are free and open to the public.
Most recently, Johnny Jones, directed the African American Theater Program at the University of Louisville. He graduated from the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff and earned a Master of Arts from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts.
“My first goal and hope,” says Jones, “is to stage plays that engage the students and community with stories that feel new and that engage the very real issues of our times, … This is a privilege and a great responsibility. As we continue to live in this current moment of social change and a global pandemic, there is an effort to prioritize the achievements, needs and issues of Black, Indigenous and people of color communities.”
The NEXUS: Readings from Black Playwrights series continues on Nov. 4, and Dec. 6. Public guests will be required to show proof of vaccine or a recent negative COVID-19 test and wear a mask while indoors on campus.
To register for this free event, visit https://westmont.edu/boxoffice.
This is the rest:
Many years ago, when I first interviewed the marvelous composer-organist Emma Lou Diemer, I was attempting a series of interviews with women composers and began our conversation by asking about the role her gender had played in her career.
Not refusing to discuss the matter from that angle, she nevertheless let me know — as gently as possible — that she didn’t find the subject rewarding, or even very interesting, and she would prefer to discuss her work as “a composer, period.”
That is to say, I think, that she wanted her music heard and enjoyed on its own considerable merits, without any affirmative action based on her biological state. Of course, she was absolutely right: music no more has gender than it has political opinions or even — sans text — religious beliefs.
Drama is somewhat different, of course. It is impossible to write a symphony about social injustice, without resorting to words. African-Americans have a long, grueling history of mistreatment by European-Americans: slavery, lynching, rape, beatings, and it is only natural that, when they found their voices, African-American writers would take this history, all or in part, as their first subject.
And why not? It is a widespread delusion in America that the best thing to do about an enduring (or newly arisen) social problem is to make a movie about it. And the first black dramas tended to be less about the black characters, than blackness itself.
That is what is so interesting about Johnson’s choice for the first play to be staged. “Gloria” has little to do with its author’s experiences growing up black in America and much to do with his time at the New Yorker, as writer and associate editor. Most of the characters in the play, white and black, are aggressive young writers, intent on making their mark.
The often quite consequential reactions to what they write is of little concern, so long as they capture and hold the public’s attention. Though quite literally shocking, “Gloria” is never vulgar, and often rather funny.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.