Watch for Writing on Racism To Play a Central Role at Sunday’s Tony Awards

Last year marked the first time a Latino author won the Tony Award for best play, when Matthew Lopez took home the prize for “The Inheritance,” a sprawling account of AIDS’s impact on different generations of gay men. This considerable precedent was overshadowed in much of the awards coverage, though, by the admittedly shocking news that another contender in that field, Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play,” which had received 12 nominations — an all-time record for a new play — was shut out entirely.Mr. Harris is black, and “Slave Play” — a sly, imaginative study of the roles of race, sex, and power in relationships that manages to link the Antebellum South with modern couples therapy — had transferred to Broadway after winning acclaim downtown at New York Theatre Workshop. When Tony voters, of which I’m one, collectively failed to give it a single award last September, some saw it as nothing less than a slap in the face 15 months after George Floyd’s brutal murder sparked a new chapter in our country’s ongoing reckoning with racism.At this year’s Tonys ceremony, which airs live from Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, two of the five candidates for best play are by black writers, both of them women. Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has two additional Tony nominations under her belt — including another one this year, for her libretto for the musical “MJ” — was recognized for “Clyde’s,” a comedy following ex-convicts working at a truck-stop sandwich shop.Dominique Morisseau, also a previous Tony nominee and the winner of numerous honors over the past decade, was tapped for “Skeleton Crew.” One in a trio of plays labeled “The Detroit Project,” after Ms. Morisseau’s native city, “Crew” also focuses on blue collar workers, in an auto shop, who have endured their own struggles and are now confronting upheaval in their industry.Joshua Boone and Chanté Adams in ‘Skeleton Crew.’ © Matthew MurphyThe trials documented in “Clyde’s” and “Crew” — with uproarious humor in the former play, more earnestly in the latter — have as much to do with class as race. Although one character in “Clyde’s” sports white supremacist tattoos, the prison time he might have avoided had he been a wealthier man gives him some common ground with the others, played by black and Hispanic actors, even if his crime was more heinous. And while the characters in “Crew” are all black, part of the tension between them stems from differences in financial stability and job status. That’s not to say that race and class are mutually exclusive concerns, or that either play presents them as such. As Ms. Nottage so potently conveyed in one of her Pulitzer winners, “Sweat” — an account of corporate greed’s impact on a working-class town that, while written before Donald Trump’s election, explained it as cogently as any work of fiction (or nonfiction) I’ve come across — few factors have done more to exacerbate racism in recent decades than economic insecurity and its attendant despair. (The white character in “Clyde’s” was actually introduced in “Sweat.”)Great American playwrights, operating in a culture where meritocracy is trumpeted but advantages are hardly distributed evenly, have long had to struggle with such dynamics. August Wilson, who tackled them with as much power and insight as any other A-lister, and with more poetry than most, did so from the perspective of a black citizen whose teens and young adulthood had coincided with the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, Arthur Miller did so from the perspective of a cultural Jew who had come of age during the Depression, and Tennessee Williams did from that of a gay man raised in the South.Of course, slavery and its legacy hold a uniquely terrible place in our country’s history, and it stands to reason that racism would have been a more prominent influence and concern for Wilson, whose plays traced its ravages through the 20th century. The same is true for his successors, who are still grappling with them in very personal ways. Yet you needn’t downplay enduring injustices to observe that in “Crew” and “Clyde’s,” bigotry is more an implicit evil (those tattoos notwithstanding) than a pervasive theme. (Ms. Morisseau did address racism, and slavery specifically, more directly this past season in “Confederates,” which ran off-Broadway.) In fact, of the plays competing for this year’s Tony, the one that nods most heavily to both past horrors and lingering small-mindedness was written by a white man: Tracy Letts, whose “The Minutes” recognizes the devastation of Native Americans — another group that suffered mightily so that others could move forward — in its chilling climax. Perhaps progress can be measured not only by the number of playwrights of color being produced but in the breadth of the work. Two of the best new plays I’ve seen recently, both in off-Broadway productions, find black writers taking vastly different dives into community and family dysfunction: James Ijames’s “Fat Ham” — this year’s Pulitzer winner, incidentally — offers an incisive, hilarious takeoff on “Hamlet,” while Donja R. Love’s “soft” tackles racism more directly in its bracing, lyrical account of young men at a correctional boarding school.I wouldn’t be surprised if either or both of these plays moved uptown, as “Slave Play” and “Skeleton Crew” did, and became future Tony contenders. Stay tuned.

Watch for Writing on Racism To Play a Central Role at Sunday’s Tony Awards

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