The Play
Two strangers meet on a train: a young black man, Clay, and a white woman, Lula. Their encounter is filled with passion, lust, and danger from the very beginning. Eventually, Clay succumbs to the temptations of Lula as she demonizes him for being a black man wanting her, and kills him in front of the entire train.
Our goal as a 2018 production team is to acknowledge the flaws of each character. While the story allows us to understand the vindictiveness and racism of Lula, we also must understand that Clay is not perfect. Despite being heavily rooted in myth and archetypes, Baraka has created two fallible humans, sinful in their own ways.
These quotes were chosen from various articles and essays to highlight characteristics of Clay, a working black man just trying to stay clear of trouble, and Lula, a bohemian temptress exercising power with her privilege. Click through the links to further explore the inspiration for our characters!
ClayThis subway ride is Clay's reality. He plays along and even embraces Lula's wild actions. But when the ugliness of racism overtakes her flirtatious words, he can no longer bite his tongue. Clay's rage and his own hate for his white oppressors explodes in a moment of frustration and raw outrage. For Clay, this is the end of the line.
more times than not, white people can fear for their lives when they come into contact with African-Americans, and society believes in that fear. My survival strategy was to make myself as non-threatening as possible. I became so well-practiced in the art of not offending racist white people that I ceased to become outraged by them" ...fitting in with white colleagues has its limits, and from the sense that only other black men can really understand the challenges associated with being black and male in these spaces — the persistent negative stereotyping, the complicated dance of managing interactions with white women to avoid appearing threatening, the need to avoid ever being perceived as the “angry black man.” Police officers stop and question an innocent black man outside the subway station
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LulaThis subway ride is a game for Lula. She has no stakes in the affair and while it escalates to the worst kind of human interaction, she will leave the train unscarred. Lula uses her sex appeal as a weapon and her porcelain skin as an alibi. For Lula, it's on to the next station...
“Would she express her contempt so gleefully if it weren’t obvious to her—she is an animal who can instantly sniff out fear—that her whiteness and femininity matter more to Clay than his own “lukewarm” manhood?” Whiteness, like other racial categories, is socially constructed and actively maintained through social boundaries. A key strategy in maintaining these boundaries is through efforts to define who is, and is not, white, with ample historical evidence showing how the boundaries of whiteness are malleable across time, place and social context." Weary weaponizing of white women’s tears. White feminists stand as the guardians of the doors of feminism, while women of color are those who remain homeless in this feminism, the ones who don't quite belong in the imagined homeland. " Dude Beats Racist Woman For Calling Him The N-Word & Kicking His Groceries!" This World Star HipHop article, despite its outrageous title, could easily fulfill the plot of Dutchman. Regardless of this woman's and Lula's reasoning, the main idea is that the black man just trying to get somewhere on public transportation, was pushed to the edge and instigated to resort to physical violence. Headlines like this remind us that Baraka's story exists in the present.
Popular white celebrities of the feminist movement sporting problematic shirts
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Rise in racial attacks on the subway:
The New York City Human Rights Commission accounted for a 480 percent increase in discriminatory harassment claims in the metro between 2015 and 2016, according to The New York Times. So far this year, police have recorded 22 hate crimes on the transportation network: 11 in Manhattan, eight in Brooklyn, two in Queens and one in the Bronx. That represents a 340 percent increase over the same period last year, when there were only five."
A white woman comes to grips with her privilege while on the subway:
I think about every single actually illegal thing I have ever done and realized one harrowing fact:
I have never been touched by a police officer, or been handcuffed or been to jail. I have never even gotten a ticket. I have never left an interaction with the cops with anything other than a “have a nice night.”
-Jaime Davenport recounts the "most disturbing train ride of [her] life" as a group of black kids display their plan of safety for an approaching police officer