Fairview

As Beverly’s husband, Dayton tends to complement her anxious personality with jokes and teasing, which she doesn’t always appreciate. However, the two have a few romantic, affectionate moments that show their genuine love for each other. He sees himself as the man of the house, and he bristles when Beverly insists that Mama will take the seat at the head of the table for her birthday dinner, but he relents easily when she stresses the importance of family. He may need explicit instructions to buy Beverly’s specific root vegetables and procure the correct place settings, but he also jumps into action without being asked and replaces the burned birthday cake. Dayton also clashes with Beverly’s sister, Jasmine, suggesting to Beverly that inviting her to dinner is contrary to her goal of having everything go smoothly. He is also protective of Beverly, making sure that she gets water instead of wine after she faints. He is always there to comfort her when she panics. Although Dayton demonstrates that he is a fully stable and responsible partner and father who pays the family’s bills on time every month, Jimbo, playing Tyrone, changes the family’s reality by stating that they are about to lose the house. Jimbo also gives Dayton a gambling problem, then upgrades it to a drug problem. Finally, Jimbo/Tyrone adds a serious illness, an affair, and a sexually transmitted infection (STI) to the increasingly contorted narrative. Thus, Dayton’s stability and credibility are sacrificed to Jimbo’s racist belief that the authentic Black experience requires the presence of hardship and poverty.

As Beverly’s sister, Jasmine has a complicated relationship with Beverly, often finding ways to make her life difficult. For example, she shows up and announces that she has stopped eating dairy and blames Beverly for not asking her about her new dietary restrictions—a convoluted attempt to criticize her sister. However, despite her adamant insistence that she is not eating dairy, she still sneaks bites from the cheese tray when no one is looking, even spitting out a bite of cheese and hiding it to maintain the appearance that she is sticking to her diet. Jasmine and Dayton also have a mutual disdain for each other. Because she relishes any hint that Dayton might have done something wrong, she jumps in to defend her sister’s honor when Jimbo/Tyrone starts to pile on accusations in Act III. Jasmine also clashes with her mother, and her offstage visit with Mama in an upstairs bedroom ends with her shouting at Mama to open the door and let her back in, which Mama apparently refuses to do. Despite these conflicts, Jasmine is close to her niece, Keisha, and they even have a special greeting. Jasmine agrees to help Keisha broach the subject of a gap year with Beverly, and Keisha clearly trusts and confides in her. Jasmine also has a flair for drama, sometimes probing where she sees a weakness or a hidden secret. In Act III, when the white characters start inflicting chaos on the family, Jasmine enjoys the scandals; she immediately believes without question that Keisha is pregnant and that Dayton is losing the house. Because the white characters do not inflict an equally devastating circumstance upon Jasmine, her role is largely that of a nosy bystander.

If the play as a whole could be said to have a protagonist, it would be Keisha. As a teenager in her parents’ house with little power, she may not drive the action forward in the play-within-the-play, but she does drive the action of tearing apart the conventions of traditional theater, tearing aside the fabric of the reality in which she lives. Keisha is an overachiever who excels in sports, academics, and extracurriculars, and she is about to graduate high school. Her parents, especially her mother, expect Keisha to continue her pattern of overachievement in college next year, following in the footsteps of the other women in the family, but she wants to take a year off first, something that Beverly forbids her to do out of a sense of precedent and tradition.

Keisha is young and optimistic, and unlike the adults in the play, she is not so settled into her life that she ignores or resists change. She is the only character who sees through the performance into the metatheatrical world. Specifically, she responds with confused revulsion when Suze invades the play as Mama, and she struggles to find the words to describe what is happening. These moments demonstrate that Keisha is seeing something that is meant to occur below her level of perception. Thus, Drury implies that Keisha still sees the world as changeable. She is the optimistic voice of the future and can see its possibilities, but she is also learning about power structures that exert themselves beyond her control. The Act III revelation of her so-called pregnancy represents the attempts of those power structures to impose a stereotype upon her that does not fit her at all. Rather than becoming a teenage mother, Keisha’s earlier dialogue delivers a very subtle implication that she might be romantically involved with Erika. Ultimately, Keisha appeals to the audience to take their place onstage and to allow her and her fellow Black people to speak and share stories without the imposition of The Voyeuristic White Gaze.

Of the four white characters who intrude on the play occurring onstage, Suze is the most socially and racially sensitive, but she is still just as guilty as her companions of imposing racist stereotypes upon the Frasier family. The four characters each represent a different type of racist, and their many misconceptions combine to irrevocably warp and destroy the narrative. Jimbo’s question about race and the ensuing conversation make Suze squeamish because she is aware enough to realize that the group’s conceptions of racialized identities are offensive, but she is unable to articulate why this is so. She therefore represents the neoliberal assertion of racial tolerance that lacks a corresponding effort toward change. As a white person, she also indulges in self-aggrandizement by engaging in dialogues about race at all. This performative but ultimately ineffective version of activism is visible in the company she keeps and the conversation she entertains. The other three white characters are confident in their absurdly broad racial stereotyping, and Suze’s acceptance of them as friends indicates that she sees racism as something that can be neatly compartmentalized; she does not see it as a factor that would justify ending a friendship. As the others convince Suze to answer Jimbo’s question with minimal wheedling, Suze reveals that her own version of racism manifests in a condescending desire to teach Black people basic life skills, and this egregious attitude is compounded by her appropriative belief that she truly understands the Black experience, as if there is a singular Black experience. Her childhood nanny, Mabel, a Black woman who cared for Suze until she left for college, made her feel more loved than her parents did, and these memories cause Suze to feel entitled to a sort of honorary Blackness. This attitude is dramatized by her decision to take on the role of Mama, who is the family matriarch and the guest of honor at the birthday dinner party. As Mama, Suze makes a grand entrance as she descends the stairs, basking in the praise and care of Beverly and Jasmine. Suze does not indulge in a racist mimicry of Blackness like the other three white intruders do, but her invasion becomes even more insidious because she centers herself in the scene and takes on the role of the keeper of family wisdom and history.

Jimbo is a stereotypically entitled white man whose name suggests a brand of aggressively white masculinity intended to invoke aspects of the southern United States. He has no interest in racial sensitivity and actively promotes racist stereotypes both in his conversation in Act II and his performance in Act II. Even in Act II, when Jimbo is merely a voice, his way of speaking is forceful and violent. When Mack jokes that Jimbo would switch races just to be able to say the n-word, Jimbo asserts that he would say the word if he were Black and stresses his ability to say it while white if he so chooses, just as he can say anything else. His question about race, initially posed to Suze, is based in an attempt to belittle Suze’s neoliberal views on race. Jimbo is just as self-assured and confident in his words as Suze is tentative in hers, and he draws Mack and Bets into the conversation as reinforcements to validate his arguments against Suze. Jimbo therefore represents a swath of American whiteness that feels oppressed by the acknowledgement of racism as ubiquitous among white people, and which balks at any initiatives to promote sensitive and thoughtful language about race. At the end of Act II, Jimbo proves that he cannot tolerate any conversation that does not center on him, even when he started that conversation himself. Significantly, Jimbo identifies himself as the villain of his own imaginary movie, and he functions as the villain in the play as well. When Jimbo appears in Act III as Tyrone, he demonstrates that his limited comprehension of racial identity is the result of willful ignorance and is based more on his idea of entertainment than on a true lack of awareness. He wreaks the most havoc on the Frasier family by introducing illogical plot points to tear them apart, and he also starts the food fight, acting as a deliberate agent of chaos and destruction.

Mack is arguably second to Suze in terms of racial sensitivity and cognizance among the white characters, but this is not a high standard of anti-racist attitudes to strive for. If Suze is the inert, stereotypical liberal and Jimbo is the unapologetic racist villain, Mack presents as the seemingly educated racist. When Jimbo asks Mack his question about race, Mack does not hesitate or balk like Suze; instead, he ponders aloud for a moment before answering in order to consider the question logically. This moment of reflection ostensibly sets him apart from Jimbo, who had a ready answer to his own question that showed very little depth of understanding about race. By contrast, Mack asks clarifying questions about how this thought experiment, forcing Jimbo to set parameters that had not occurred to him. Initially, these considerations suggest that Mack’s answer will be more intelligent than Jimbo’s, but Mack’s response proves to be just as shallow and racist. While mulling the question, Mack wonders whether he should choose a race that would bring out an innate quality in himself, or if he should pick a race outside of his comfort zone to experience something new. Through this line of thinking, Mack casually reveals his belief that entire races can be generalized as sharing certain behavioral traits or abilities. Then he decides to pick “Latinx” (41) because he wants to be fiery and sexual; this assertion contains some of the shallowest and most widespread stereotypes of Latinx people. The true extent of Mack’s racism is revealed when he plays Erika in Act III, for he plays a drag queen version of a teenaged Black girl. Mack also takes just as much pleasure as Jimbo does in creating racist plot twists that destroy the Frasiers’ lives, and he is the one who fabricates Keisha’s pregnancy and makes it manifest.