PrideFest – Saturday, June 18th, events beginning at noon, parade starts at 8:00 PM.
Fairview at Trinity Repertory Theatre – performances through Sunday, June 19th
Chuck: PrideFest is back after a 2 year break. We talked with Rodney Davis, the president of Rhode Island Pride about some of the highlights you can expect on Saturday.
RODNEY DAVIS: Rhode Island Pride is really excited to be having its all day PrideFest once again. In past years, it used to be on South Water Street. And we actually outgrew the area. And so now we are moving across the river to the new Providence Innovation District Park on the other side of the pedestrian bridge. We’ll be having over… well over 250 vendors in our business marketplace, we have a social resource area, food trucks, as well as a mainstage where we have both regional and national entertainment all day long. Other unique features of pride: we have… Hasbro has a kid’s pride zone. We also have an arts area. And it’s just a lot of fun. It’s the gathering of a lot of people, our communities that intersect, whether they be from the LGBTQIA plus community, people of color, our faith communities, they all find this space to be a great opportunity to do as our theme says for this year, our theme for Pride is “together again.”
JAMES: The illuminated night parade is a little bit different from other pride events across the country. Is that right?
RODNEY: We’re not the only ones. So in 2001, we initiated this new idea of doing a nighttime Pride Parade. And at first people were a little skeptical of it. They’re like, Why mess up a good thing? We’ve been doing Pride at noon time, melting in the in the asphalt every year, why do you want to change things? But in actuality, that change was very helpful in establishing Pride here in Providence in Rhode Island, so that it is now recognized not only in the nation, but even internationally, for its uniqueness, and just the energy that it brings to downtown Providence for that one day.
CHUCK: The first nighttime event that I went to, I was just knocked out by it by how joyous it was and how how everybody seemed to come together and and celebrate it and I’m not just talking about Pride people I’m talking about people who looked like my family from the Midwest who just wandered in by mistake, you know, and got caught up in it. Everybody seemed to be having a great time and enjoying that spirit. And lately, it just seems like that might be splintering a bit. When I look at those people that they just arrested in Idaho, who looked like they were headed to disrupt the parade there. And some of the messages that are coming out of the right wing that just seem so intolerant, that I’m wondering what happened? Because I don’t… I don’t recall that from a couple of years ago, you know?
RODNEY: Well, I don’t believe that it has changed. I think there have always been individuals who have had this viewpoint and mindset. It has only been over the past, let’s say, eight years. Maybe we’ll just say six, that individuals have been given permission to show their bigotry and to show their hatred. And as a result of that, we are now seeing something that used to be as you would say, under the surface, people are now seeing it being manifest. The only thing is, is that we as individuals who embrace diversity, who embrace this intersection of cultures need to be just as vocal. And that’s what Pride is about. Pride is about being who you are. And having the courage to be able to do that. I think that for as much pressure is put on us, we have to push back. And we do it. Interestingly, not out of anger, but out of love. The movement within the LGBTQIA plus community is about love and identity. Who we love, and how we identify. It is one of the most foundational things his country stands for.
JAMES: PrideFest starts at noon on Saturday at the innovation district park in Providence. There will be performances by Ada Vox, Pangina Heals, Willie Gomez and more. And the Pride Illuminated Night Parade begins at 8:00 PM. The list of events is available at Pride R-I dot com.
[music: Ada Vox sings “Creep” by Radiohead]
JAMES: Jackie Sibblies Drury won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Fairview, which is on now at Trinity Rep. We saw it recently and …. It’s difficult to talk about … for two reasons. One, we don’t want to give away any of the surprise turns in the play, and two, it’s about race which is not always easy to talk about.
CHUCK: Yeah, I went into Fairview with a sort of a vague idea that this was a play that was going to ask me to confront my identity, and how I felt about that. But I wasn’t sure how they were going to do that. And the play starts off looking very conventional, almost too conventional.
JAMES: The first act is basically a half hour sitcom. It’s about an upper-middle class Black family preparing a dinner party for Grandma’s birthday. The program notes make reference to 90’s sitcoms like Family Matters, but thankfully there’s no Urkel in the show.
CHUCK: There’s a husband and wife played by Joe Wilson Junior and Mia Ellis. There’s the teenage daughter Keisha played by Aizhaneya Carter and Jackie Davis plays Aunt Jasmine.
JAMES: It’s 30 minutes of very gentle comedy, with jokes that are just mildly funny. The husband forgot to pick up the proper ingredients for the meal; the wife has to have the cheese plate arranged just so; the teenager drops the contents of her backpack all over the stage.
CHUCK: It’s a sitcom.
JAMES: It’s almost like the playwright is trying to lull us into a false sense of security.
CHUCK: There are some hints that there may be a conflict involving the teenage daughter that would build into the drama of a ‘normal’ play, but then at the start of the second act, they throw everything out the window and you don’t know what is going on.
JAMES: The play opens with the line “What are you looking at?” Which flies under the radar as a typical sitcom line from a wife to a husband. But you see the line “What are you looking at?” performed again at the beginning of the second act and it’s a question directed at the audience. The playwright says that surveillance is one of the themes of the play, in particular the ‘white gaze’ surveillance of African Americans.
CHUCK: The white gaze can mean the unacknowledged assumption that the viewer of a play is a white person or it can be the feeling of surveillance that people of color can experience while being observed by a white viewer.
JAMES: The events of the second act make the idea of the white gaze explicit. And by the third act, the gentle sitcom humor is gone and we’re bouncing from outrageous stereotypes to a surreal food fight.
CHUCK: And then it ends in a way that I have never seen a play end before in my entire life, and you, the audience become totally involved in it. And so you walk out of the theater, and you’ll probably spend the next few days wondering, what was that all about?
JAMES: It’s definitely a piece of theater that makes you think, that confronts your expectations and that even makes you a little uncomfortable. Just what you’d expect from a Pulitzer-prize winning play.
CHUCK: There are just a few days left to see Fairview at Trinity Rep, it’s on through Sunday, June 19th.
[music: end credits theme from Family Matters.]
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