Sitrep 10: April 13, 2025

I enjoyed revisiting Passing Strange this week. It is one of those “limited run” Broadway shows that has a certain level of sophistication in the writing and uniqueness in the storytelling that will get it to Broadway and have audiences dancing along but won’t ever draw in enough of the mainstream tourist crowd to keep it open for very long.  The writing covers a lot of ground while still managing to be a coming of age/coming of artist story that has universal reverberations, all wrapped up in a rock concert that really does rock. And it makes me miss my mom. In the context of the course, I also feel like it was a fortuitous pairing with Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. Juxtaposing Stew/Heidi Rodewald with Wilson “advances a complex representation of the operations of blackness” (20), the importance of which we have been discussing throughout the semester. Gayle Wald also takes pains to point out this significance in her article. Though Wald is discussing the notion of identity in the narrative of Passing Strange, her point that “the persistence of class, gender and geographical distinctions among African-Americans nullifies any notion of a monolithic post-civil rights ‘generational’ experience” (14) applies to our work as pedagogues. It is exactly the narrative we should be attempting to make known to students in our teaching. It is also a narrative that risks being missed in a straight-up representational approach to building a course syllabus. If we, as pedagogues, simply check boxes in any survey course we build by slotting in a “black” play week, or a “Latinx” play week, the danger is an unintentional tokenization and recentering of the dominate cultural narrative by positioning certain plays as “other.” And even if one expressly refutes the narrative of monolith through lectures, Sandra Richards makes clear that "If you tell them they still don't know. You got to show them how to find it for themselves"(159).

For me, the coupling of Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean in tandem with Passing Strange offers an experiential model that makes it readily apparent that there is no monolithic black narrative. Wilson paints a certain kind of Black experience, with his stated aim that audiences are made aware of Gem’s African American characters’ connections to a deeper continental African history, generalized as that may be in Wilson’s play. Passing Strange does something very different, exposing the myth of a monolithic black urban experience with the memorable line, “ain’t no one in this play that knows what it’s like to hustle for dimes on the mean streets of South Central.”  Putting the two plays beside each other made it readily apparent to me, and I assume it would also be apparent to students I might teach, that Wald’s “distinctions” can be readily and effectively demonstrated. Wilson and Stew in conversation shows teachers a way to help students “find it for themselves.” When so many of the questions this course wrestles with feel unanswerable, our course content this past week was inspiring to me, as the pairing felt like a successful model of how one might curate future syllabi successfully.