Fairview

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions and discussions of racism, race, and Black racial stereotypes.

In the first act of the play, the audience takes the comfortable role of sitting, silent and unseen, in a dark theater and watching the Frasier family’s drama unfold. This voyeurism is a normal, expected part of attending a play. Theater audiences, which are usually made up of people who are predominantly white, educated, and upper-middle class, observe the action onstage and then retreat to homes and coffee shops to privately discuss and analyze what they have just watched. In most cases, the text of the play is written long before the performance, so theatrical performances often reflect little cognizance of how the weight of the voyeuristic white gaze imposes itself and shapes what it watches. Act I gives only subtle indications of Drury’s intention to upend common theatrical conventions in an attempt to reveal and indict the harmful effects of the white gaze. To this end, the epigram before the play quotes Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), an autoethnographic text in which the author speaks philosophically about the production of Blackness as a social construct shaped by the imposition of the values and culture of white colonizers.