Smart People

Play (2014)
by Lydia R. Diamond

With McKinley Belcher III (Jackson Moore), Miranda Craigwell (Valerie Johnston), Roderick Hill (Brian White), Eunice Wong (Ginny Yang)

Brian White is a Caucasian-American professor of psychology at Harvard. His energetic way of promoting a thesis about racism draws a strong institutional response which he processes at some length with his friend, Jackson Moore, an African-American surgical resident, his love interest, Ginny Yang, a Chinese-Japanese-American professor of psychology and therapist, and Valerie Johnston, an African-American actress who has also been involved romantically with Jackson.

White’s research has demonstrated, theoretically, that people’s brains are hard-wired, in some sense, to be racist; regardless of noble intentions to be open-minded, subliminal patterns show a far stronger tendency towards prejudice and stereotype than one might have thought.

The setting of the play is 2008, just before and after Obama is elected president, which adds an ironic underpinning to the presumptions of White’s thesis.

This is a play of ideas, basically, and tries to make its way, comically and dramatically, by improvising on their implications among this group of academic friends who also have personal and romantic connections with one another.

Though the underlying ideas here are suggestive and the comic waves they make sometimes hit their mark, the overall effect is fairly disjointed.

The play begins with a dinner party that includes the four friends and recapitulates that scene towards the end of the play. But the play develops, for most of its duration, as a kind of collage, depicting, in four separate scenic quadrants, the lives and concerns of its different characters. The coming together of characters in pairs at various intervals and at the dinner party provides some dramatic coherence, but the story tends, throughout, to not really collect itself.

It’s not quite clear what the drama is meant to be built around. Is this a series of reflections about the notion of race? If so, the ideas and the intellectual drama never get very developed. Is it a treatment of these particular characters and their interactions? If that is the case, the treatment of each of them and their relationships seems fragmentary, never really seeming to hit home.

The Chinese-Japanese-American psychologist, a MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner, is intense and passionately argumentative at one point with her neuropsychologist love interest Brian White about the need to work endlessly hard to achieve her goals; but, not long after, she seems pressed to her limits in several scenes in which, endlessly and obsessively, she is on the phone with customer service people at catalog shopping stores. This small, funny observation about the inconsistent emotional constitution of an apparently “smart” person gives a little insight into her character, but there is very little else that gives a sense of who she is or how any of the developments in the play affect her.

The African-American actress, Valerie Johnston, is put off by the seemingly inane and insensitive direction she is given in a production of The Merchant of Venice, with the implication that the director is talking down to her because she is African-American, but we only get a small taste of that setup.

The African-American surgeon, Jackson Moore, angrily responds to his surgical supervisors, again, with the implication that their response to him comes from subliminal racial judgment, but we get so little of the situation that there is no sustained chance to understand what the relevant factors are.

And, of course, the white neuropsychological researcher, Brian White, is in a seemingly angry frenzy at his students, colleagues, and the world at large based on his thesis of subliminal racism. But, somehow, he does not seem genuinely angry on principle; his most authentically annoyed response seems to be that he is not a MacArthur “Genius Grant” honoree also.

Though the play raises interesting questions about the deeper, unintentional, roots of racist feeling and response, it does not really wrestle with those ideas very much. There is the allusion to the notion that our brains are “hard-wired” to respond this way, but no real discussion about what hard-wiring actually means.

One of the included essays in the program refers to actual research done by psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji (authors of Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People [2013, Delacorte Press]) which demonstrates something akin to what the play’s character, Brian White, avers, but which, I believe, is argued much more subtly by Greenwald and Banaji.

Rather than simply arguing that the brain is hard-wired for racist thinking, Greenwald and Banaji, if I am not mistaken, argue that our subliminal thinking about race, though it may be very different in kind from our conscious thinking, is soft-wired, malleable, and still available to our reflective modification. By recognizing such patterns of subconscious reaction, we can, indeed, develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and learn, over time, how to become less unintentionally racist.

A play of ideas that wrestles effectively with these notions would invite that sort of subtle reflection and modulation on the more brash hard-wired for racism notion and see what its dramatic implications would be. It’s a difficult thing to do successfully.

Smart People comically suggests some of these subtle reflections but never really engages them. Not really about character and plot, it seems like it wants to be a play of ideas – but it hovers over them, never quite getting there, poking fun at its central ideas but not really wrestling with them.

Nonetheless, there are some quite funny moments.

A character talking about psychologists notes they are rarely introspective; a throwaway line, but subtle and pointed, it really hits home in the context.

Brian, the Caucasian-American neuropsychologist, reflects to his African-American surgeon friend, Jackson, about how identified he has become with people of color; Jackson hilariously rejoins that pretty soon he’ll be so black he’ll have trouble flagging down a cab. It comes out easily and naturally but is a very sharp and effective line.

Perhaps the wittiest observation comes from the black characters’ responses to the white researcher’s hard-won thesis about subliminal racism among well-intentioned whites, quickly agreeing that this is not news to any black person. It’s a wry and effective response. Had the play devoted itself to what that difference of outlook implied personally for this group of characters it would have been considerably more potent.

The actors are fine and Peter DuBois’ direction carried off well enough to make the evening an enjoyable one. Though the play does not really wrestle with the idea of subliminal racism nor dramatically test the implications of that idea in a very probing way among this group of characters, there is enough cleverness in the text to make this intellectually-tinged piece a pleasant enough amusement.

– BADMan