Angry? Sure, but ‘White Boy’ murky about Jewish roots
Friday, October 31, 2008 | bymatthew surrence
To his African-American homeys, Macon Detornay is a “wigger.”
A white, Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs seething with rage at white-on-black injustice, Macon is the title character in “Angry Black White Boy,” Dan Wolf’s multimedia performance piece adapted from Adam Mansbach’s 2005 novel of the same name, playing through Nov. 16 at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco.
Macon wears a Malcolm X T-shirt and has the number 042992 tattooed on his forearm — not out of solidarity with Holocaust victims, but to commemorate the date of the first Rodney King verdict.
But clothes and tats are hardly enough to assuage his liberal guilt. So when Macon moves to New York City to go to Columbia University, he gets a job driving a cab and starts robbing his yuppie fares at gunpoint, relieving them of their wallets and neckties while treating them to a blast of “black” rage before he figuratively kicks them to the curb.
In Wolf’s vital performance that anchors director Sean San José‘s kinetic Intersection for the Arts/Hybrid Project/ Campo Santo co-production, Macon never talks “black.” Still, the stunned people he robs, in their fear, describe him as such to the police.
When Macon’s finally caught, he’s bailed out by his crew and, having become New York City’s latest race lightning rod — a kind of reverse Bernhard Goetz — he embarks on a series of TV interviews to publicize his “Race Traitor Project,” intended to culminate in a national “Day of Apology” — an idea Macon cribs from Malcolm X, in which whites will finally apologize to blacks for slavery and racism. But Macon’s notoriety, and the ultimate emptiness of his fury, start to close in on him, until his own day of reckoning inevitably arrives.
All this is in Mansbach’s novel, and it’s given an engaging hip-hop mashup by Wolf, with fellow strong cast members Myers Clark, Keith Pinto and Tommy Shepherd playing multiple roles and instruments (Shepherd created the show’s evocative music and “soundscape”). The cast also employs story-theater narrative techniques, pantomime, rap, do-wop harmonizing and deft choreography to propel the 21⁄2-hour, two-act performance.
However, despite its compelling theatrical package, the adapted material is too muddled and redundant (particularly in the second act) to forcefully convey either the satiric or tragic aspects of the story.
“How did I get here?” Macon asks, a salient question that never gets answered. We don’t see or learn anything about his youth or his milieu. Although the book has more Jewish content, the play only briefly notes that Macon is Jewish, and there are no shout-outs to Jewish concepts of guilt or justice.
Crucially, no connection is made between the Jewish Day of Atonement and the Day of Apology in Macon’s manifesto. And it’s particularly puzzling that Macon’s parents, who surely would have had something to say when he’s arrested, are never seen, much less mentioned. All that’s noted about his family history is that it’s been three generations since anyone in his family has set foot in a synagogue.
Macon has his anti-racist rap down, but he fumbles, with ingratiating knowingness, his attempts to bond with his black friends — whether he’s sharing hydroponic weed, performing in a guerrilla theater troupe or trying to expiate the ancestral guilt of his great-grandfather, a racist baseball star, by bonding with the great-grandson of a black baseball star.
Although these scenes are punchy in their writing, acting and directing, they don’t add up to a coherent whole. The post-intermission scenes, mostly consisting of Macon’s series of interviews alternating with his and his “Race Traitor Project” cohorts’ political arguments, become repetitive and tiresome, sending the play to a sputtering anticlimax.
“Angry Black White Boy” runs 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays through Nov. 16 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., S.F. Tickets: $15-$25. Information: (415) 626-3311 or http://www.theintersection.org.