(Re)Visions of Race: Contemporary Race Theory and the Cultural Politics of Racial Crossover in Documentary Theatre

In African American playwright Anna Deavere Smith's House Arrest, 1 we see a group of twelve actors of different genders and races play across lines of race, age, and gender to "become" Bill Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, celebrities, journalists, prison inmates, and academicians, among a vast array of historical and contemporary figures. An epic view of the presidency through the legacies of slavery and sexual misconduct, House Arrest is both multicultural symphony and a demystification of power. Similarly, in Culture Clash's Radio Mambo and Culture Clash in Bordertown, interview-based plays about Miami and San Diego respectively, the Chicano-Latino male trio "become," among other characters, elderly African American women, a Cuban drag queen, a middle-aged Haitian father, a Jewish art dealer, a Hmong car gang member, and Shamu the whale. At one level, this "rainbow coalition" can be read through a liberal humanist imaginary suggesting that, if we can perform "others," in [End Page 81] what literary critic Susan Gubar calls "racechange" 2 and critic Michael Awkward terms "transraciality," 3 the boundaries of race--and by implication, gender, sexuality, age--might be "transcended."