What a Piece of Work Is Man!

Found in the Prologue of What a Piece of Work Is Man! Full-Length Plays for Leading Women, Bridge to Baraka: I Am That Bear is excerpted and adapted from the solo show Bridge to Baraka by Yvette Heyliger.

AT RISE: A musical selection reminiscent of the early seventies composed by Larry Farrow called BLACK ARTS BOOGIE plays as lights rise. Music fades as YVETTE X, dressed in an Afro wig, bell-bottom jeans and a dashiki, plays an African drum.

YVETTE X: Calling women. Calling all women: mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, aunts, nieces, girlfriends and grandmothers… wherever you are, calling you. Urgent. Come in you women. Come on in.

My name is Yvette X, Uptown Artist. I am not a man. I am not white. I am not thin, and I am not young, but I write plays for the American theatre featuring roles for leading women. Y’all have heard the statistics, it’s pretty bleak. In the whole history of the American Theatre, no female playwright has ever been produced to the extent of any male playwright—and you can believe when things are hard for white women, they are doubly hard for black women. Why, at the rate things are going, women may not see equality in the American Theatre for another hundred years! That’s what, like two hundred years for me?!

So, you may wonder, what gives Yvette X the determination, the courage, the audacity to write plays for the American Theatre—to write the plays she wants to write, the way she wants to write them? On whose shoulders does she stand? To find the answer to that question we have to go back—back to Black!

[Sound cue, James Brown’s hit song, SAY IT LOUD - I’M BLACK AND I’M PROUD. YVETTE X dances a step from the time period.]

Did you guess on whose shoulders I’m standing? No? Well, hold on to your seats. This may shock you. I am standing on the shoulders of the Black Arts Movement.

Is there anyone here that was around in the sixties? Well, there’s a lot more to it than what you might remember—more to it than, “Whitey did this to us,” and “Whitey did that to us.” More to it than a bunch of angry poems, rioting and finger pointing. Luckily, I have documented my revelations in my soon-to-be-released, self-published book… [SHE gets her book, takes in a deep breath and exhales the title.] “Yvette X’s Evolutionary Pilgrimage to the Black Arts Movement and What Women Playwrights Can Take From It to Inspire Them to Keep Fighting the Good Fight.” Now, feel underneath your seats. Anything there? Nothing, right? That’s because instead of putting a copy beneath your seats like they do on those talk shows, for the price of a theatre ticket, I’m going to lay it on you live right here from this stage! Can you dig it?

Now, in the interest of time, I’m going to give you the CliffsNotes version of my book. Picture it. The United States of America. Black folks have won the right to sit at white lunch counters, in the front of the bus, next to white kids in class—even the right to vote. But the day-to-day quality of life for most Black folks was still the same—poverty, unemployment, lack of education, decent housing and health care. You name it—Black folks needed it, couldn’t get it, but were expected to pay taxes for it anyway. And because only white folks could own guns, black folks were defenseless against unchecked violence and murder at the hands of those whose job it was to protect them—the police!

[SHE chants a slogan from the period.]

“Arm yourself or harm yourself! Arm yourself or harm yourself!” No longer content to turn the other cheek or wait until they get to the gold paved streets of heaven to get their milk and honey, you had a whole bunch of fed-up, angry Black folks ready to take some white folks out!

But dig this; what happened was some Black folks chose the PEN instead of the GUN as a means of armed self-defense against the System. Even those who had never picked up a pen were writing for themselves, by themselves and about themselves in a way they never had before. Not caring what “The Man” thought about it, or if he would ever read it, review it or by a ticket to see it—pushing the envelope and breaking every rule governing grammar, style, form, content, and plain old good manners. All up in your face and emboldened by their blackness, Blacks were out-and-out rejecting Western standards, traditions, and values; smashing, burning and looting white ideas, white ways of doing things, white ways of being, white ways of looking at the world; and most importantly, seeing ourselves the way white people see us.

The writing that came out of that period of history was a militant literary movement the likes of which America had never seen. Known as the Black Arts Movement, it was not for the faint of heart. In fact, the Black Arts Movement was felt by many to be reverse-racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, separatist, and generally inflammatory. I’m telling you, black folks were out of control! They turned poetry into bullets and called it “Black Art.” White folks don’t know how close they came—just an ellipsis, an em dash, or a comma away from meetin’ their maker! They were scratching their heads wondering, “Now, what bear did we poke?” Sweet, sticky honey! I just thought of something. I AM THAT BEAR!

I am that bear that writes plays for the American theatre featuring roles for leading women, in a country where no female playwright is produced to the extent of any male playwright, living or dead. I am that bear standing on the shoulders of artistic warriors whose poetry, plays and essays were like honey from the Tree of Life—recognized, sought after and consumed for the first time in spite of their buzzing, stinging, sticky words. These forerunners of multiculturalism could not be denied a place in the heretofore lily-white canon of American literature, just as we women will not continue to be denied equal pay and access to America’s stages!

For heaven’s sake, if Black folks facing relentless racism in the sixties could leave a literary and cultural legacy to the melting pot, then surely we multicultural women in the new millennium can write and publish our plays for ourselves, by ourselves, and about ourselves; starring female leading characters; signing our gender specific names; with or without an agent, a pedigree from a prestigious writing program, or a review in The New York Times; and get those plays to the ticket buying masses, “by any means necessary.”

Heck, we make up roughly 70 percent of those ticket buying masses anyway. We bring the men to the theatre! Since we hold the purse strings, why not have more of a say about what we’re dragging our boyfriends, husbands and significant others to see?

Women playwrights are crammed together on the back of a bus filled with plenty of open seats for men. We don’t have to fight with each other over the few open seats that are left. We don’t have to ride that bus. We can walk—no, march, to our destination.

[SHE sings a stanza of the anthem, WOMEN STAGE THE WORLD, music and lyrics by Sheilah Rae.]

WOMEN HAVE A PROBLEM THOUGH NO ONE TAKES THE BLAME WORK DEVISED BY WOMEN IS RARELY IN THE GAME.