I have been thinking lately about harm—when it’s real, and when it’s exaggerated for political reasons. And as harm escalates, at what point does it require us to intervene on behalf of ourselves or others?
Yesterday, I recorded a conversation for my podcast Theater Fag with playwright Isaac Gomez. We met in the offices of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, where his new play “La Ruta” is currently finishing a sold-out run. “La Ruta” is about the women of Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican border city that suffers one of the highest crime rates in North America, if not the world. Disproportionately impacted by the violence in Juárez are women, who regularly go missing without any hope of being found.
Obviously the situation in Juárez is an example of real harm. Like gay men with AIDS in the 1980s—like trans women of color in the United States today—the women of Juárez are dying preventable deaths at an insane rate, and nobody in the dominant culture gives enough of a shit to make it stop. Isaac’s play, “La Ruta,” is a tortured cry for mercy, one belonging to a theatrical tradition that includes plays like Larry Kramer’s seminal AIDS polemic “The Normal Heart” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Anna Deveare Smith’s verbatim account of the Los Angeles riots (in which Congresswoman Maxine Waters is a character, by the way).
In our conversation, Isaac and I discussed the roots of violence in Juárez, which Isaac attributed to toxic masculinity and failed US policy. Of the former, Isaac elaborated that he can draw a straight line from small acts of gendered insensitivity—microaggressions such as a man interrupting a woman to explain a point she was in the middle of making—to more grandiose expressions of violence, such as rape or murder. My impulse in the moment was to disagree and question the equivalence I thought Isaac was making. But after a night’s sleep on the matter, I think agree with Isaac’s general point—unchecked privilege corrupts, and if we don’t intervene when violence presents itself, it will escalate.
The women of Juárez are in a daily fight for their lives. The stakes for them could not be higher. That’s why, when people start to talk about feeling “safe” and the stakes fall somewhere short of life or death, it’s important to pause before offering our support and validation. Unfortunately, not all claims of victimhood are intellectually honest, and sometimes, folks who identify as victims are actually perpetrators. These situations require a different kind of intervention.
This week, the boys from Covington Catholic high school in a Kentucky have been all over the news, after a viral video clip in which one boy wearing a MAGA hat—Nick Sandmann—stared down an indigenous veteran named Nathan Phillips, who was seemingly just banging his drum. Since the release of that initial video, dozens more clips have surfaced, some of which show that Mr. Phillips intentionally walked into the Covington Catholic group, and others of which show an unrelated group of Black Israelites screaming nasty shit at every person who passed them, including the Covington Catholic boys and Nathan Phillips.
Some people claim these videos exonerate the Covington Catholic boys. Others say they implicate Nathan Phillips as a provocateur. What’s compelling to me is the immediacy with which reactions split along party lines. Lefties are Team Phillips, righties are Team CovCath. I have way too much trauma surrounding Catholic schoolboys of my youth to be impartial, but what I will argue is that the Covington Catholic boys are not victims here. I don’t want them destroyed, but I want to see some accountability. And when I see a lot of white adults minimizing their actions, I feel compelled to intervene.
The fact remains that Nick Sandmann stood aggressively close to Nathan Phillips, his posture and smirk fixed with a rigidity familiar to anyone who, like me, has been physically threatened or assaulted by a Catholic school meathead. Regardless of the aftermath, this was not a boy who was standing by innocently. He was full of the all the bravado an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex allows, and that—to my eye—is undeniable in any of the videos I’ve seen so far. It’s an expression of the toxic masculinity Isaac mentioned in our discussion of “La Ruta.”
Part of the PR campaign the Covington Catholic community is waging involves blaming the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group of absolutely wild bigots that stand in public spaces and say naaaaaaaasty stuff about gays, women, etc. The reason for this PR move, I believe, is that Covington Catholic knows on some level that truth seekers will look at Nick Sandmann in those videos and see a young man eager for conflict, not peace. To avoid this murky discussion, they instead point to the Black Israelites as the instigators. “Look, these folks said faggot, that’s way worse.” Unfortunately, these two unrelated wrongs don’t change the interaction between Sandmann and Phillips on that video.
I was once a teenage boy, and I remember what a brutal period of self-discovery those years were for me. I made so many mistakes and treated folks around me with tremendous disrespect. To say the least, I’ve spent a lot of my adulthood making right the wrongs of my youth, and I am so lucky that every single fucking person wasn’t armed with a recording device when I was 16. I share this because I truly wish the best for the Covington Catholic boys—that they may overcome this moment, emerging on the other end with renewed faith and commitment to peace. I don’t see that happening, however, because as Nick Sandmann told the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie, his only regret is that he didn’t walk away from Nathan Phillips (a subtle suggestion that Phillips was the aggressor), and he does not feel that he has anything for which to be sorry. If the only offense the Covington Catholic boys committed that day was Nick Sandmann glaring disrespectfully at an elder, then that would be enough to warrant an apology. Unfortunately, Nick Sandmann and whatever crisis PR firm is handling his case do not agree. (If you do not think Nick Sandmann’s glare was disrespectful, then let me ask you this: how would you feel if you saw him standing that way before your mother, father, grandparent?)
The problem is not so much the Covington Catholic boys as it is the adults who thrust victimhood on them. (And unrelatedly, I can’t help but imagine, if society cared this much about gay boys as it does about these Catholics then Bryan Singer would’ve been dealt with decades ago. But that’s another story.) The community that has built around Covington Catholic is absolute—the boys were not wrong, and any assertion otherwise is an attempt to ruin children’s lives. Their supporters are misrepresenting the stakes in order to argue that MAGA folks are under attack. An attack on these boys gives MAGA supporters a chance to transfer their own feelings of victimhood, and so the amplification of their stories has created a deafening “poor me” echo chamber.
Speaking of poor me, in December I got into a Twitter fight with a playwright named Jeremy O. Harris, whose “Slave Play” was a controversial hit for the New York Theatre Workshop. The controversy wasn’t so much about the play as the playwright himself. I haven’t read or seen Slave Play, so I can’t speak to the piece’s merits, but I can speak to the way Jeremy behaves on social media, which seems to be carefully cultivated.
The initial buzz around “Slave Play” was huuuuge. As Jeremy himself said, the play went viral. The reviews from white NYC theater critics were overwhelmingly positive, with a few notable exceptions. On Twitter, however, criticism began to mount from a surprising corner: other black theater makers took serious issue with the way black women in particular are treated in the play. Some folks went as far as to say that Jeremy’s play was its own sort of violent act against black women, and they used things he’s said and tweeted publicly to support this. I won’t quote any of them, but it’s all there for you to find, if you want to.
All I can honestly say about Jeremy Harris is that I do not believe his social media persona is authentic. While “Slave Play” was enjoying an often sold-out run, he began tweeting about all the death threats he and his cast were receiving. For sure, horrific shit got hurled at Jeremy and his collaborators. At the same time this was happening, producers were looking seriously to bring the show to Broadway. Jeremy took to Twitter and called attention to the tweets and emails, claiming the threats he and others received numbered in the hundreds. I called bullshit on that number, and I wondered whether every mean tweet he received was actually a “death threat.” I suggested Jeremy was performing victimhood to engender sympathy that would distract from his critics and/or help facilitate a transfer, and perhaps that’s a leap too far. But I tweeted what I tweeted: I do not believe Jeremy Harris received “hundreds” of credible death threats over a play at an off-Broadway house. (For the record I never @ mentioned Jeremy on Twitter, he found my tweets on his own.)
In my back-and-forth with Jeremy, I made the mistake of roping critic Elizabeth Vincentelli into the discussion. Wasn’t really fair of me, because I don’t know her. But she was one of the only mainstream dissenting voices in her assessment of “Slave Play,” which she said ripped off better plays like “An Octaroon” and “Underground Railroad Game.” Elizabeth responded on Twitter to tell me that her problem was with the play, not the playwright, and she sort of scolded me for making inferences about Jeremy’s personality based on his tweets. Jeremy, who loves to herd critics on social media, jumped back in after EV’s capitulation, letting her (and me) know that “we stan critics.” The “we” referred only to him. Lol.
The funnier thing is that, two weeks later, on her podcast “Three on the Aisle,” Elizabeth did exactly what she admonished me for doing on Twitter—drawing conclusions about Jeremy the person—and she used much harsher language than anything I tweeted. She doubled down on the derivative nature of “Slave Play,” describing it as “a play that is embarrassing in its self-satisfaction and the way it revels in this empty provocation that is not really provoking, because people are just expecting it.” She elaborated:
“It’s is also written in an incoherent, smug manner that I found really, really annoying. Just the ineptitude of the writing was confounding, I felt. This play should’ve stayed in the oven, it was not ready to be pulled out… Reading the script afterwards, it annoyed me even more. The script is a window into the way this playwright’s mind works that is not really all that interesting.”
She later described anyone who was shocked by an event that happens in Jeremy’s play as “a target sitting still.” Harsh words for an artist and his audience. I wondered why she would be so brazen on a podcast yet conciliatory on Twitter. It made me wonder if she was afraid to bring the full weight of her position to Twitter, in writing, before Jeremy. And if that’s the case, then what positional power does she perceive that he has over her? Could be generational. Jeremy and his social media followers are presumably savvier to the medium than EV, which I imagine she would understand, so perhaps that’s part of the reason. Regardless, my question now, in light of everything, is: do we still stan critics like Elizabeth? (FWIW, I do. EV is one of the greats among NY’s theater critics.)
My beef with Jeremy truly isn’t so personal, although his personality seems challenging based on our Twitter interactions. That’s not real life, though, I know that. Jeremy and I have never met, only battled from our phones. Theater is the art I care most about, and I’m interested in who holds the power to create it.
Jeremy is a power-holder, despite repeatedly trying to position himself as an outsider. As far as I can smell, Jeremy is disingenuous in these claims, as he was when he overstated the number of actual threats he and others received. I believe that doing so helped bring attention to his play. Of course I have absolutely no concept of what it’s like to be a queer black person in America, but I do know that Yale Drama School—where Jeremy is finishing up his MFA—is the nerve center of NYC’s theater establishment. You cannot graduate from Yale Drama School and call yourself a theater outsider. Sorry. It’s just not honest. And when we allow dishonesty, for whatever reason, we allow injustice to escalate. And we stan only what’s just.