Nadia Pillay, Kaleb Jackson, Eric K. Roberts, and Terreon Collins in Theatre Y’s “We Are Proud To Present”/Photo: Devron Enarson
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Since its founding in 2006, Theatre Y has been devoted to creating the kind of cross-cultural, inclusive creative stew that nearly every other theater company in the region has baked into its mission now. Theater Y’s stated commitment is to “experimental content” which marshals theater as “a tool for liberation and a revolutionary practice.” It carries forward the spirit of counterculture free street theater that was formative in Chicago’s theater scene beginning in the late 1960s. (One of the originals, Chicago’s Free Street Theater, is still going.) Theater that’s so publicly bent on revolution promises provocative, energetic stagings. Theater Y delivers with its current production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2012 “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.”
The absurdist, meta seeds of playwright Drury’s better-known play “Fairview,” winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, are present in “We Are Proud to Present.” Drury wrote the earlier work in 2008 while a graduate student at Brown. Chicago is a birthplace and favorite home for “We are Proud to Present”: it was selected from more than a hundred new plays in a competition held by Victory Gardens, which staged the work’s first production in 2012. Steppenwolf also produced the play as part of its series for young audiences.
Drury messes with the rituals and conventions of theater to get deep inside messy interlocking themes, including ethnicity, bias, justice, empathy and creativity. “We are Proud to Present” is framed by the attempts of a troupe of Black and white actors—and one director, who, ambiguously, never self-identifies as either, but might be assumed to be one or the other—to present a stage work that introduces an often-overlooked and horrifying chapter in Africa’s colonial history.
Kaleb Jackson, Nadia Pillay, Kris Tori and Terreon Collins/Photo: Devron Enarson
As the title announces, it takes place in the relatively short, but consequential period during which Germany counted itself as the literal owner of a swath of Southwest Africa that is larger than Germany itself. To secure the territory, the German colonists shifted their alliances with local populations, enlisting one ethnic group against another and then flipping its allegiance. In an increasingly destructive cycle, allies became enemies and enemies turned allies. The Germans shifted property and cattle from one group to another and eventually took control of both for German settlers. When one of the local populations, the Herero tribe, joined in armed rebellion against the colonists, the Germans set in motion policies that led to the murder of over 100,000 Herero, eighty-percent of the group’s population, and the often deadly confinement of the rest to concentration camps. The chapter is a chilling warm-up to Hitler’s Final Solution. As the letters of Germans sent to relatives back home—the play uses actual texts—shows, the moral horror of the mass executions seemed not to register on the colonizers. Or at least, be a matter they deemed necessary to share. In Drury’s account, the Germans’ actions in Africa are never linked to racial theories, but instead are motivated by colonial lust for the land and resources. And, for the soldiers doing the killing, by duty.
The play opens with a short lecture on the colonial history which gives a solid thumbnail overview of the crimes. Though the mini-lesson makes promises to return to details of the history, the play never gets around to many of them. That’s because the actors’ creation of the work is soon overwhelmed by the players’ own senses of historical racism and their difficulty reconciling with each other’s perceptions. Above all, the Black actors and the white actors battle over whom, if anyone, has moral authority to tell the story of the Herero people. Do the Black actors get a bigger say because the history of Blacks in America has its own terrible legacy? Or, does the fact that there is no physical documentary evidence of the suffering of the Herero make it okay to rely on the existing letters of white German colonists—presented by the white actors—from whom the facts of the genocide might be extrapolated? The Black actors reckon with the existence of evidence from white Germans. They also acknowledge the lack of documents from Black Africans. Yet, they have zero interest in creating a work that continues the enduring practice of telling the story of Blacks through the experience of whites. “We are Proud to Present” takes on all this and more. The workshopping of the play within the play gets increasingly tense as the story of the distant horrors links ever more with the lives—inner and outer—of the actors.
Eric K. Roberts and Andrew Schoen/Photo: Devron Enarson
The play itself, in structure and language, reveals the kind of works Drury was drawn to in graduate school. Big themes aside, the writing and structure should intrigue and delight students of theater. Ionesco, Pirandello, Beckett and Thornton Wilder may have been favorites of Drury’s earlier self. And why not? In addition to the device of the play-within-the-play, Drury serves up an earthquake that destroys the fourth wall. There are rapid flurries of incomplete sentences and tennis-match-like exchanges of antithetical points of view. There are long, tense, silent movie-like periods of slow, non-verbal action and moments run amok that arise from the pits of the characters’ non-rational selves. But if Drury is shooting at the kings of Absurdist drama, her aim is murderous, too. In “We are Proud to Present” race, identity and injustice make the existentialist preoccupations of the classic Absurd dramas feel like child’s play. Drury has killed the kings.
Theatre Y’s production features a marvelously nimble cast that is repeatedly willing to take big risks on stage. In the role of the director, Nadia Pillay brings strength and grace. Her stage movement is energetic, balletic and has a physical vocabulary as wise as the written script. Eric K. Roberts, Andrew Schoen and Kris Tori take on the roles of white characters who are both convincingly torn and in need of affirmation. Kaleb Jackson, as one of the unnamed Black characters, moves from angry young man to being the character with the deepest empathy for the historical victims. Jackson’s fierce performance repeatedly raises the emotional stakes. Terreon Collins is convincing as a young innocent traumatized by his fellow actors.
One last note. Theatre Y now performs in a handsome, ancient storage building in North Lawndale, a building it bought and converted. The show and the company’s new building are both worth the trip.
“We are Proud to Present a Presentation about the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915” at Theatre Y, 3611 West Cermak, theatre-y.com. Through May 21.
Buggin’ Out: A Review of Bug at Steppenwolf Theatre The audience is the fly on the wall of a dingy Oklahoma hotel room where Agnes White is taking refuge from her recently released, abusive ex-husband Jerry.
