Phoebe Hansen | Phoenix Staff

BY ANNE COLEMAN

In print | Published February 12, 2009

Stephen Graf ’09 thinks that theater should be more like video games. At least in his own work. When Graf’s honors thesis in Solo Performance opens on Friday, Feb. 13, the structure and pace will be a reflection of, as he puts it, “the MTV generation,” in reference to our generation’s inclination towards the quick cuts and frenzied entertainments of “The Real World” and games like Resident Evil and Halo.

The piece is “a sporting event of the mind,” according to Jackie Vitale ’09, for whom the project is an honors thesis in dramaturgy. It is that and more. Graf’s performance will ask you to turn on a dime to enter a completely different world with each vignette. That said, you won’t get whiplash. The performances take enough time to embrace each style and to savor the rich and wild spaces in Graf‘s mind.

The choice of topic is immeasurable in its scale and politics. The press release describes it as “question[ing] both the invisibility and power of whiteness in a contemporary U.S. context, and search[ing] for ways for white people to confront the persisting problems of unawareness, privilege, and hatred that accompany whiteness.” He is interested in the perception by most whites of whiteness as an absence of race — as he calls it, “unmarked.” After the scene with his moms, I doubt that white audience members will be able to think the same way again.

Graf is quick to volunteer that he isn’t, in any way, writing and performing this piece in order to change his white audience’s worldview and identity: “If it happens, fine, but I wouldn’t count on it.” Instead, he is exploring the moments when he has realized his own failings and setbacks on the path to a true white, anti-racist identity, the path to finding and embracing accountability where others only put blame. Sharing this with an audience is inherently a step beyond his internal struggle, but the piece is nonetheless a focused exposure of what he expects of himself.

One of Graf’s particular hopes for the piece is that this overtly political work has enough variety in content and medium that the audience will be able to disagree with moments in the work without recoiling from the piece as a whole. Whiteness provides a clear umbrella topic to the piece, yet Graf has also engineered both a narrative and a series of distinct experiences, with which the audience is not required to identify.

In explaining the structure of the piece, Vitale quotes director Maria Möller, ”[It’s] like many different islands that are sort of linked by an ocean of context, but you really are sort of running to go from one to next.”

The execution is largely effective. I suspect that some of the really powerful moments and thoughts of the original drama (i.e., moments where the anger may have been too direct) have gone to the cutting room floor, yet the original intention is intact. The piece has been restructured to make it more palatable for an audience of mixed backgrounds and perspectives through the inclusion of an outside director. Moments where one more step would have Graf in explosive territory toe the line just enough to make one uneasy, but never so much that one wants to run and hide. In that way, Graf and his team have pulled off something wonderful.

Graf and Vitale have a symbiotic relationship when it comes to the development and pursuit of Graf’s vision. Vitale sees her job as making Graf’s ideas and vision accessible to the audience without altering it or rendering it impotent. She has pushed far toward that end, and where vignettes fail to feed or fight each other — the exploration of the Latino presence in theater, for instance, while interesting, doesn’t seem to fit under the piece’s umbrella — it is not a failing of her efforts.

The piece is joyful, angry, wild and intelligent. If you think you can escape whiteness, you are mistaken; the main set piece in the performance is a large white cube perfectly centered in the black box theater. Graf is entirely unapologetic, the quality that first drew Vitale to working with him. His experiences and performance are unequivocally worth your time and attention.

Graf said, “I think there’s definitely the possibility of people being like ‘I don’t know if Stephen and I would get along.’ I think you could come away from this piece thinking, ‘I don’t agree with him,’ but hopefully there would be some communication.” And that is a conversation that I think you’ll want to have if you give his performance a chance.

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