Pulitzer-winning play Fairview takes a mind-bending look at race in America
The Search Party production presents its performers with a daunting technical challenge
The Search Party and b current Performing Arts present Fairview at the Cultch Historic Theatre from September 27 to October 8
THE FIRST RULE of Fairview is that you don’t talk about Fairview.
Okay, that’s not exactly true.
In fact, talking about Fairview is precisely the reason that Mindy Parfitt and Yasmin D’Oshun have taken a break from rehearsals to connect with Stir on a Zoom call. Parfitt and Kwaku Okyere are codirecting the play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, with D’Oshun playing the role of Keisha, the youngest child of a suburban African-American family.
American playwright Sibblies Drury has said that she prefers audiences go into Fairview without foreknowledge of what it’s about. She told the Guardian in 2019 that this is “not for plot reasons. It’s not like you find out that someone was dead the whole time. I think that it’s more allowing oneself the ability to have your own experience watching something. The way that people process things is a really individual thing, and experience is individual in terms of your upbringing, in terms of your class, in terms of your race, in terms of the people that you’ve been friends with, the books that you’ve read, your references.”
For her part, Parfitt is eager to discuss the Pulitzer Prize–winning play, but equally keen on avoiding spoilers.
“As much as the audience can go into the experience knowing as little as possible is helpful for them to be able to embrace the surprises as they come,” she tells Stir, “but we can say that it is a play about the white gaze on Black culture and how that dynamic has affected Black and Brown bodies. We can also say that it is at times incredibly heart-wrenching and at times incredibly funny.”
D’Oshun adds: “Even if you know the script, you’re going to have a very different experience watching it all play out physically.”
It won’t be revealing too much to say that the show’s first act plays out very much along the lines of a TV sit-com about a Black family (think Family Matters or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). After that, things take an unexpected turn, transforming Fairview into a meta-commentary about race, representation, and the complex relationships between audiences and the stories they consume.
For the people on-stage, the play presents a daunting technical challenge that (again, without revealing too much) is akin to acting while simultaneously performing complex choreography.
D’Oshun, who describes working on the show as “a team-building puzzle”, says the trickiest part is “finding the play and the fun and the discovery with all the precise timing and movement. Finding that discovery in your body without the room to change things around is really challenging, but it’s also really fun. Everything has to be so specific in your brain. I have to know exactly why I’m doing things.”
Both in the way it puts the topic of race in America under the microscope and in the way it subverts audience expectations in audacious fashion, Fairview invites comparisons to the work of Jordan Peele, writer-director of the masterfully mind-bending psychological-horror movies Get Out and Us.
Fairview might not have quite the jump-scare factor of those films, although it’s clear Sibblies Drury does have a creep-show bent; she did, after all, write a zombie-apocalypse play called Social Creatures.
“It’s different from an ordinary, sit-in-a-seat, watch-something-happen kind of experience,” Parfitt says. “I think it will appeal to people who are interested in big stories and big presentation and humour and looking at something from a slightly different angle—which I think Jordan Peele does, right? He addresses something by looking at it from a slightly different vantage point. And I think that’s what Jackie is trying to do. She’s trying to help us look at something from a different perspective.”
There are, in fact, multiple perspectives at work in Fairview, including that of D’Oshun’s character, who embodies the voice of a generation informed by Black Lives Matter and empowered by social media.
Yasmin D’Oshun
Mindy Parfitt
“It’s on purpose that it’s the youngest person on-stage who is having a very different experience than the older family members, in the same way that within society now it’s the younger generation trying to break away from a lot of intergenerational trauma and the power dynamics that are just ingrained in society,” the actor says. “It’s a one-and-a-half-hour play. It’s not representative of all this generation is trying to do, but it’s important that it’s that character that challenges people with a bit more ferocity than the rest of the play does, and a bit more head-on sincerity.”
In that same Guardian interview cited above, Sibblies Drury predicted a short shelf life for Fairview, optimistically expressing her hope that as a society we will progress to the point that the stereotypes and divisions the play explores will no longer be relevant topics.
We’re not quite there yet, Parfitt says. “I definitely think we’re asking ourselves questions about power and privilege and racism and viewpoint and starting to have a deeper conversation about language and how the use of language affects people, and microaggressions,” the director observes. “I think all that is becoming part of the vernacular, but we have a long way to go before Fairview becomes irrelevant.”
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