Does the n-word have a place in theater?

Kent Gash: Sometimes it takes the audience a while to understand that it is being used to provoke us and to make us laugh and to see the extreme absurdity of slavery - the very idea of it.

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Kent Gash: Sometimes it takes the audience a while to understand that it is being used to provoke us and to make us laugh and to see the extreme absurdity of slavery - the very idea of it.

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By John Moore | The Denver Post

PUBLISHED: March 22, 2007 at 1:29 PM MDT | UPDATED: May 7, 2016 at 9:17 PM MDT

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One word, so loaded it cages centuries of hatred and fear, somehow reduced to a single, incendiary letter: n … as in, the “n-word.”

Its offensiveness is finally so widely acknowledged that only those who were once its targets dare utter it in polite, contemporary America. But its shameful place in history is affixed in chains – any honest depiction of the black experience in America that shies from it is a lie.

The n-word is prominent in two current high-profile area theater productions, for very different purposes.

In “Ragtime,” at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre, an Irish firefighter repeatedly hurls the epithet against a black man as a hateful reminder of how the bottom rungs of the 1906 social ladder were ordered.

In “Pure Confidence,” opening Thursday at the Denver Center Theatre Company, a Civil War slave jockey is called the n-word by his owner nearly 30 times in the first scene alone. Not as an epithet. As an identification, however thoughtless. As an acknowledgment of a historical truth.

“That’s just being honest,” said playwright Carlyle Brown. “That’s what black people were called.”

Gavin Lawrence, who plays jockey Simon Cato, “can feel the audience tightening up their spines at the sound of the first n-word,” he said.

“And I think that’s great, because if people aren’t ready to acknowledge that’s the way it was, then we can’t talk about slavery, much less racism, much less race relations today.”

Director Kent Gash said the play’s opening volley of n-words sets the audience on notice, calling into question our own use of the n-word outside of the play’s historical context.

“I mean, it’s said so many times as to be absurd,” said Gash, a 1978 graduate of George Washington High School now living in Atlanta. “And yet, it sometimes takes the audience a while to understand that it is being used to provoke us, and to make us laugh and to see the extreme absurdity of slavery – the very idea of it.

“The more it goes on, hopefully the more you understand the human ramifications of turning any group of human beings into owned property.”

Whites, blacks squirm at word

“Pure Confidence,” the hit of the 2005 Humana Festival of New American Plays, was co-commissioned by DCTC artistic director Kent Thompson, then with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. It’s an epic story that depicts the unlikely friendship between the slave jockey and the colonel who profits off him … and calls him the n-word. A lot.

“It is hard for audiences to hear, both black and white,” Gash said. “But right away it ties us into the knots of the human relationships, and all the cultural and identity questions that are being asked in the play.”

Brown admits the prevalence of the n-word in the play is no accident.

“It works for me because, hey, it gets people to pay attention, and in some perverse way, for me, it’s fun,” he said with a laugh. “You go into the theater and you look at audiences, and as soon as the n-word comes up, you can see it: white people looking at the black people for permission to laugh. Black people looking at the white people and thinking, ‘What the (expletive) are they laughing at?’ It kind of gets into everybody’s case.

“As a writer trying to be provocative, I’m an equal-opportunity employer,” Brown said. “I can offend black people as much as white people, I don’t care. We all need to think about these things, because at the end of the day, we are all in this (expletive) together, really.”

If it’s hard for the audiences to hear the n-word, even in an artistic context, imagine what it must be like to have to say it. A.K. Klimpke was never less happy to win a role than when he was cast as Irish thug Conklin for BDT’s “Ragtime.” He has to spew the n-word nine times a night – in the worst possible context.

“And it’s uncomfortable every time,” said Klimpke, who said his verbiage draws audible gasps from audiences every night. “I dread having to do it. On the very first day of rehearsals, when we all introduced ourselves, I said to the group, ‘I get to play the bigoted racist, and I don’t know a lot of you yet, and so I would just like to put out a blanket apology now for all of the n-bombs I am going to be dropping for the next four months.”

That kind of well-intentioned concern, Brown says, is endemic of white liberal guilt, and that, he says respectfully, is part of the problem.

“Everybody wants to fixate on that word,” Brown said, “because we don’t like to talk about the real issue.

“Black people have been called all kinds of things throughout time,” Brown said, rattling off a long list of historical epithets. “But at the end of the day, these people were slaves, and the American society and its economy were created on their backs. That’s the point. It doesn’t matter what they called them. What, are they going to call them ‘sir,’ and that is going to change the dynamic of that reality? I don’t think so.

“My response to people who say they are offended by the use of the n-word is that they are just as morally confused as the people who say that they will kill to save the unborn. Anybody who says, ‘I want to save the unborn, but I am for capital punishment,’ is morally confused. That’s the real problem in America. Not the n-word.”

The n-word resonates in different ways with different people and in different contexts. And that speaks, Lawrence said, “to where we have not arrived as a country in talking about race.”

Many black Americans, especially younger ones, have taken ownership of the word, much to the chagrin, Lawrence said, of older blacks. But by reclaiming the n-word and changing it to finish not with “er” but “ah,” Lawrence said, “that’s taking away the power that white America has given it.”

Nothing “cool” about it

The n-word is all over August Wilson’s plays, usually exchanged between black characters. The n-word is now prevalent in pop culture from rap music to such TV shows as “The Wire.” But that doesn’t mean everyone can use it. Far from it. Just ask Michael Richards.

“I work in schools, and it’s funny for me to hear so many white kids calling each other the n-word now,” Lawrence said. “They mean to sound cool and hip because they want to be part of that hip-hop culture. But in that context, the word has no meaning – and it should. I have a hard time with it, I must say, so I try talking to them about what that word really means. But white kids can never understand. They just can’t.”

There’s more permission in theater to use the word in its most vile context because there is presumption of purpose and the possibility of enlightenment. So you’d think audiences would be more receptive to considering the n-word in a theater. That hasn’t been Brown’s experience.

“Some people just don’t want to hear it,” he said. “It’s an unconscious thing, but we have been so fixated with ‘the lie’ for so long – this myth of who were are as Americans, that we don’t want to face the fact that we don’t really have the courage to face how flawed we are, at least in this moment in time.

“The n-word? That’s the easy out. In, some ways it’s just a distraction. If that word bothers you, then I say, let’s get down talking about the institutions where it was ever OK to say that word.

“Have you had those conversations?”

Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.

“Pure Confidence”

“Ragtime”

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