The Negroes are Congregating and Bellini is there
08 Mar 2020.

I was a little worried to watch The Negroes are Congregating, a play written and directed by Natasha Adiyana Morris. What do I, an Italian Catholic from Northern Ontario, know about blackness? Though I left the house with ample time, the TTC managed to almost ruin the night with the most agonizingly slow streetcar ride in human history. I arrived just seconds before curtain time and grabbed a seat. The first thing I noticed was that there were only eight other  people in the audience, and more than half of them were white. 

The show is a collection of vignettes on racism, performed by two men and one woman. They effortlessly slip into various characters and situations, the most crowd-pleasing being one of a couple in which the guy is hitting on girls in the audience while he dances with his woman. There are also scary episodes about police violence, highlighting the difficult space occupied by black cops, and at one point, volunteers are collected from the audience and quizzed on black culture. At another point money comes raining down on the stage. The set, consisting of three pews and a pulpit with a huge cross suspended above, is simple and effective. 

All three performers really have presence. Christopher Parker and Uche Ama, who also identify as queer, can entertain in various styles. And at the risk of embarrassing myself, I must say that I was captivated by the dashing and handsome Christopher Bautista, who looked quite striking in those pants and those shoes. I was not surprised to learn that he was once in the US Marine Corp. 

After the show, there was a discussion and feedback. When the mike was passed to me, I made some dumb remark about the money on the floor looking real. I also noted that Ama’s first line, about how weird it is to see people swimming in Lake Ontario, really made me laugh. A simple joke, it relaxed me and put me in the right frame of mind to digest depictions of blackness. “I thought the show had the right amount of anger,” I said to Morris. “And the right kind of anger.” It’s true. The play itself was enlightening without ever making the audience feel frightened or alienated or uncomfortable. No, those are all the things I felt on the streetcar ride on the way over, as some crazy lady yelled about how black women were giving her dirty looks and she wanted all of them to get off the streetcar. The black girl across from me just buried her attention in her cell phone as the rest of us wondered just how crazy the yelling woman really was. 

The Negroes are Congregating is a palatable and interesting show, and it certainly deserves a bigger audience than on the night I attended. I worry that white audiences feel that the show isn’t meant for them, and that black audiences haven’t gotten into the habit of going to the theatre. That will change. What worries me more is that the producers declared the March 5 performance “exclusively for a Black audience.” On the one hand, I get it. It’s hard to enjoy a gay show with a mostly straight audience, for instance. But I don’t agree, in the way I didn’t agree with Yolanda Bonnell’s bizarre request that no white critics review her show Bug (which played the same space a few weeks before Negroes). It suggests that the show isn’t good enough for general audiences. Theatre companies, please, stop telling the audience when they can or cannot attend, or whether or not they are allowed to critique something. The beauty of a show like Negroes is that Italian Catholics from Northern Ontario can really benefit from seeing it. Either theatre is for all people, or it is for no one. I think the other eight people in the audience would agree.