Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: My paper will discuss the theoretical insights and possible cultural impact of a new off-Broadway musical, Passing Strange, an uproarious, irreverent, and insightful meditation on the predicaments of middle class black life and “post-black” culture. Mark Stewart, aka “STEW,” is the front man for the band “The Negro Problem,” and the narrator, bandleader, and co-creator of the new musical. The play is a semi-autobiographical song cycle dramatized by a cast of six young black actors surrounded by a rock band of four white, mostly-middle aged musicians. STEW takes his place on stage as a kind of ring master in the story of how a youth, called Youth, rebels at the spiritual vapidity of his bourgeois Los Angeles Baptist church, smokes pot with the closeted choir director, becomes a punk rocker and sets out to find the ever-elusive “real” in the pot-drenched fleshpots of 1980’s Amsterdam and the speed-fueled and surface-obsessed electronica of Berlin’s anarchist art-squats. Referencing the paths of black artists before him who went to Europe to find themselves and fulfill their desires, Passing Strange meditates on the strangeness of “black folks passing for black folks,” adding a novel twist to the much more common treatments of traditional racial passing. The play’s anti-essentialism is fresh, hilarious, and thought provoking, filled with wry and generous observations about human character and human life. Only time will tell if Passing Strange represents a watershed moment in American culture by humorously loosening the straightjacket of racial essentialism.