Visibly White: Realism and Race in APPROPRIATE and STRAIGHT WHITE MEN

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Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight

White Men

Dead white males. This oft-cited phrase encapsulates the ongoing project of dismantling the privilegedmonopoly that white men have historically held over the formation of an artistic canon and cultural

tradition. In the field of American drama, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller

(despite significant differences among their work) comprise such a tradition, one that elevates the realist

family drama over other forms of theatrical representation and underlines the centrality of the white male

voice in both the imagined domestic settings and the actual public sphere. Through its prominence in

theatre programming and education, realism continues to hold influence on how plays are written and

received in the United States, evident not only in recent Pulitzer Prize winners such as Tracy Letts’s

August: Osage County (2007) and Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010), but also in designations such as

“alternative,” “experimental,” or “avant-garde” theatre, which generally refer to aesthetics that are

opposed to realism. This essay examines two recent plays that engage with this problematic tradition,albeit from an unconventional angle that probes and challenges existing representations of whiteness:

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, which were both

produced in New York in 2014.[1] On the surface, these plays stand out from the established institution

that realist family drama has become in that they were written by an African-American and Asian-

American respectively, challenging normative assumptions about the kinds of plays that playwrights of

color can or should write. But in light of Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee’s previous, critically acclaimed work on

racial identity and representation, the conscious choice to adopt—or more fittingly, appropriate—this

seemingly orthodox aesthetic warrants deeper analysis. As such, this essay attempts to explain how

Appropriate and Straight White Men disrupt the “traditional” link between realism and whiteness: in

other words, how the purposeful emulation (rather than the rejection and dismantlement) of realistdramaturgy and stagecraft can highlight issues of racial representation, even when the form has a long and

problematic history of shrouding whiteness in the myth of universality.

It was in the work of feminist critics that realism was first associated with the Barthesian notion of myth

as an ideological institution. To theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Catherine Belsey, and Jill Dolan (among

many others), realism in mainstream cinema, literature, and theatre mystified a patriarchal value system,

normalizing and universalizing the male gaze and the objectification of women by masquerading as an

unmediated and natural account of reality. Following the feminist model of cultural analysis, critical race

studies has demonstrated how an ideology of whiteness is reinscribed through media

representations—privileging identification with white characters and the gaze of white audiences, whilestereotyping non-whites to a handful of recognizable roles and scenarios. Prior to its critical scrutiny by

cultural theorists, whiteness maintained a mythic status; to be white means to not be seen in terms of

embodied race, to be regarded only as “unmarked, unspecific, universal.”[2] Thus demystifying whiteness

in dramatic realism involves asking, for example, to what extent Death of a Salesman reflects the

aspirations, struggles, and tragedy of the “common man” when Miller’s professed commonality fails to

extend beyond white people. Jacobs-Jenkins explains that his initial interest in emulating realist

dramaturgy for Appropriate emerged from asking, “what is the gulf between [Sam Shepard’s] Buried

Child and August Wilson? I went back and read every family drama I could get my hands on, and after a

while I realized they are actually all about race or ethnicity or identity. They all are but they never get

credited as that.”[3] While still acknowledging that whiteness functions differently from other formationsof racial identity, Jacobs-Jenkins attempts in his play to mark whiteness as a race, undermining its claim

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to transracial universality by making it visible. Lee engages in a similar project, although the white

characters in Straight White Men are strikingly different from more stylized renditions of whiteness in her

earlier pieces such as Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (2003) and Songs of the Dragons Flying

to Heaven (2006).[4]

In sum, myth is present in the American dramatic canon in two ways that are relevant to my reading of

these ostensibly white plays. American realist drama since O’Neill largely preserved the mythic status of

whiteness, equating “white” with “human” while excluding or marginalizing non-white experiences,

subjectivities, and modes of spectatorship. At the same time, whiteness becomes myth most effectively

through the form of realism. Elin Diamond writes:

realism, more than any other form of theatre representation, mystifies the process of theatrical

signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism

operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an

objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of that world.[5]

Diamond’s theoretical work on mimesis, with realism as its most rigidified version, translates Barthes’s

definition of myth—“the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making

contingency appear eternal”—into one that is specific to the conditions and contexts of theatrical

representation.[6] The critical vocabulary developed by feminist criticism on spectatorship and

identification cover some of theatre’s unique conditions. We may also include here Varun Begley’s

extension of Diamond’s theory to objects on stage, in which the fully rendered living room sets and

realistic props (the epithetic “kitchen-sink”) of stage realism serve as “ideological guarantors” that help

reinforce the truth effect of the theatrical representation: “Conventional realism proclaims what thingsare, rather than exploring how they might be appropriated and used.”[7] The overbearing presence of

material things in Appropriate and Straight White Men fulfill the expectations of realist stagecraft, but

when whiteness is highlighted, the socio-economic dimensions of these objects (property, the inheritance

of wealth and social status, relationships to labor and leisure, etc.) also stand out. These twin principles

outlined by previous scholarship will be crucial to my analysis: realism mystifies both itself (by replacing

theatrical representation with an “objective world”) and racial hegemony (by replacing whiteness with

universality).

That said, the parenthetical aside in the last clause of Diamond’s quote introduces a difficult problem to

the framework of realism and (de)mystification. She concedes that realism inevitably reinscribes thedominant ideology even when the intention is to challenge it. While Diamond sought to develop an

analytical method that moved beyond the compromised politics of realist dramaturgy (which she calls

“gestic criticism”), other scholars have attempted to qualify myth-based critiques of realism to account

for realist plays that do not, in their view, reinforce hegemony.[8] Using the example of Terry Baum and

Carolyn Meyer’s play Dos Lesbos (1980), which takes the form of realist drama but advances a radical

feminist/lesbian perspective, Jeanie Forte attempts to “identify a feminist writing practice that emulates

realism but operates as a different discursive strategy, perhaps a pseudo-realism.”[9] Similarly, Josephine

Lee argues that the critical discourse on realism and ideology must be revised when dealing with Asian-

American family dramas that adhere to conventional realism. Not only do the plays of Frank Chin and

David Henry Hwang “work against a sense of mastery, of total identification, for either the AsianAmerican or non-Asian American viewer,” they also provide opportunities of spectatorship that “support

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rather than oppose moments of sympathetic identification.”[10] Forte and Lee believe that realist

dramaturgy can engender a sense of belonging and political purpose for minority groups when placed in

the right hands, contrary to Diamond’s assertion that realism can only reinforce and mystify. But it seems

to me that these counterarguments rely on the assumption that such plays feature characters and audiences

that both belong to the minority group in question: that the Chinese-American families depicted in Chinand Hwang’s plays speak to Chinese-Americans in the audience. Only in this setting can something as

inimical as “sympathetic identification” (which plays a crucial role in how ideology is reinforced,

according to earlier theorists) can be recuperated “to authenticate through public performance a vision of

ethnic community hitherto erased from public view.”[11]

But how, then, are we to understand the all-white casts in Appropriate and Straight White Men? Strictly

speaking, these plays couch the lives and perspectives of white characters within a mode of representation

that subtly instates the stage as a reflection and extension of reality. Do these works still qualify as pseudo-

realism, in other words, appropriations of realism that avoid its ideological pitfalls? I wish to make the

case that they do, which requires a further revision of the critical discourse on realism and myth. Unlikeearlier dramatic appropriations of realist dramaturgy, Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee are not interested in

divorcing form and ideology; instead, they acknowledge and make full use of the historical affinity

between whiteness and realism. That is, the conventionality of realism itself can highlight issues of race

not by satirizing or parodying whiteness, but by rigorously embodying it. Indeed, what makes these plays

so innovative and potentially radical as artistic interrogations of whiteness is the fact that they are not

parodies. Some of the characters are unlikeable, but not necessarily because they are white. They are not

caricatured vessels of dominant ideology, but rather individuals: struggling, confused, and emotionally

torn. After all, if the “privilege of being white in white culture is not to be subjected to stereotyping in

relation to one’s whiteness,” then reducing whiteness into a stereotype is subverting it without probing

the full extent of the white culture that guarantees that privilege.[12] Instead, these plays surprisingly ask the audience for old-fashioned sympathetic identification towards their white characters, even as they

draw attention to the privileged, unequal position that whiteness has and continues to occupy in American

society.

White supremacism, the most extreme manifestation of whiteness as ideology, literally forms the

background of Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, set in a derelict manor in southern Arkansas that was once a

slave plantation. Following the death of the estate’s owner Ray Lafayette, his three estranged children, all

middle-aged, return to their old family home to take stock of the property and auction it off to repay their

father’s steep debts. The past works on the present as the family’s long and painful history emerges

through expository recollections and mutual accusations of past misdeeds in typical realist style. Yet thecharacters are cautious and defensive when the past that they dig up touches upon the history of racism.

Toni, the eldest daughter, is especially averse to admitting that the disturbing artifacts that they find in

their father’s bookshelves and closets mean anything, although she repeatedly insists on remembering the

past to emphasize how much she has suffered and sacrificed to keep the family from falling apart. Franz,

the youngest, returns unexpectedly after running away ten years ago after he was convicted of child rape

to seek emotional closure and start a new life. His fiancée, River, encourages Franz to forget the past

without acknowledging the racial legacy enmiring the crumbling house: “This place is still in your bones

and you need to let it go. And, tomorrow, when you see it’s gone, you’ll be free. It’ll become someone

else’s problem and you’ll be able to sleep again.”[13]

Before examining how these characters and their juxtaposition against the house’s history engage with

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issues of whiteness, it is important to note that the Lafayette siblings are fully-realized and emotionally

complex (if somewhat over-expressive) people, molded from the same cast of conventional realism. Ben

Brantley of the New York Times notes that Jacobs-Jenkins “has achieved the difficult feat of making them

all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with,” meaning that the play does not treat these white

characters as physical stand-ins for an abstract racial construction.[14] Such a concrete foundation of realist characterization is vital to how Jacobs-Jenkins then makes their whiteness salient—through their

interaction with an old photograph album depicting lynchings of black men. The album’s spatial journey,

discovered by accident on the living room shelf and passing through the hands of every character over the

course of the play, creates a secondary plot that runs parallel to the family conflict among the Lafayette

siblings; the range of responses to this document of racist violence—shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination,

disregard, aversion—is as diverse as the characters’ inclinations and perspectives on more personal

matters. Yet despite such individualized responses, the photographs mark all of the characters as white, as

people that have never experienced the discrimination and violence that Hilton Als describes in his essay

on actual lynching photographs: “Fact is, if you are even half-way colored and male in America, the dead

heads hanging from the trees in these pictures, and the dead eyes or grins surrounding them, it’s not toohard to imagine how this is your life too, as it were.”[15]

Whiteness becomes apparent when these characters are unable to imagine the terminated lives in the

photographs. Toni refuses to believe that the photographs are even a part of her father’s life, arguing

throughout the play that they could have ended up in the house by chance. Bo, the middle sibling, wants

to throw them away until he discovers that there is a lucrative market for this “highly specialized

collector’s item” (75). When River and Cassidy (Bo’s fourteen-year-old daughter) are caught looking at

the album, River distances herself from the images by treating them as an educational tool: “Cassidy was

actually very mature about them. She was asking all the right questions. She was using the internet” (53).

Yet the lynching photographs do not completely upstage the main plot. In keeping the focus on the livesand emotional struggles of individual characters, whiteness shifts in and out of view, clearly visible when

the photographs demand attention and fading away when the family fights take over. Jacobs-Jenkins

subtly stages opportunities for these opposing registers of whiteness—visible and invisible—to bleed into

one another, rather than building up to one grand gesture in which whiteness is fully exposed and

demystified. In this way, Appropriate is a sophisticated and carefully crafted meditation on how

whiteness functions differently from other races. Steve Garner writes: “whiteness is a position from

which other identities are constructed as deviant. The invisibility of whiteness therefore stems from never

having to define itself explicitly. It is seen as the human and universal position requiring no

qualification.”[16] Thus whiteness is rendered invisible when Toni suffers over her divorce and sense of

failure as a mother, or when Franz seeks redemption for the pain and trouble he has caused his familybecause the conventions of realist drama ensure that they are human first and foremost in these moments.

In adhering to realism, Jacobs-Jenkins demands that the audience acknowledge and grapple with the

privilege of invisibility granted to whiteness while not losing sight of race in the background.

Realism’s reliance on material objects to verify the truthfulness of the representation here becomes the

playwright’s principal means of keeping invisibility in check. The house itself serves this purpose well;

in the end, the siblings are trying to claim a fortune accumulated through the exploitation of African-

Americans. But hidden throughout the detritus cluttering the set are more explicit reminders of racist

violence that intrude on the characters whenever they are about to forget the house’s racial history. For

example, the important photograph album (which will resurface constantly throughout the play) makes itsfirst appearance right after Toni and Bo’s squabble about who is more responsible for the estate’s ruin.

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Bo complains that the two graveyards within the property—one for the family’s ancestors, another for the

slaves—make it difficult to sell the house “with all the red tape and historical ordinance crap”(21). As if

the house is somehow responding to this dismissal of history, Bo’s wife Rachel discovers exactly at that

moment that her eight-year-old son Ainsley had been flipping through the lynching photographs, abruptly

ending both the argument and the scene. Later, Toni and Franz argue over inheritance rights and Franz’spast sex offenses when other family members enter carrying jars of desiccated body parts: “souvenirs”

taken from lynchings. And in the emotional climax of the play when the pent-up anger and frustration

explodes into a physical brawl involving all of the adult characters, Ainsley enters wearing a Ku Klux

Klan hood he found in his grandfather’s closet. Again, this image immediately ends the fight and the

scene. These shocking mementos of racism not only disrupt the dramatic structure, preventing arguments

and fights from carrying on, they also mediate the audience’s perception of race in the play, turning these

“people” into “white people” in the blink of an eye.

The mounting evidence of their father’s racism pressures the characters themselves to navigate this

difference; the siblings want to claim what is left of Ray’s material legacy but at the same time “disown”the racial legacy inscribed in his possessions. In this way, Appropriate specifically addresses the most

current iteration of whiteness as ideology: the myth of the post-racial. Post-racial politics reinscribes the

dominance of whiteness by claiming that American society has moved beyond race after the “success” of

the Civil Rights movement (amplified by the election of President Obama). According to social critic Tim

Wise, this myth insists that “economic forces, and even ingrained cultural factors within the African

American community have overtaken the role of racism in explaining the conditions of life faced by black

and brown folks, especially the urban poor,” denying the impact of intergenerational disadvantages

caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws, as well as institutionalized racism today in the guise of colorblind

public policy.[17] Not only does the notion of a post-racial society perpetuate norms and value systems

that have historically privileged whites, it erects an impermeable border between whiteness before andafter the eruption of race politics in the mid-twentieth century. When River accuses the entire family of

racism, stressing “the evil and cruelty you’re descended from – that’s in your blood,” (84) Bo goes on a

defensive rant that reflects this post-racial attitude:

Nobody asked to be born, okay? And certainly nobody asked to be born into this – this –shitty history, so

tell me what you want me to do. You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great grandparents?

Or should I lynch myself? […] I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody! (84)

Bo’s frustration and overreaction is in some ways understandable. Significantly, there is nothing in the

play that suggests that he has done anything that would make him a racist in the way that his father was.But at the same time, even Bo’s appeal to his individuality is conditioned by whiteness; “I didn’t enslave

anybody!” (84) can only be a meaningful statement of one’s morality to a white person.

Meanwhile, the curse metaphor that River evokes is in response to Franz’s long speech about how he

threw the photograph album in a lake. He describes this spontaneous act as a healing ritual for himself,

which River then extends to the family’s cursed history of racist violence. But Franz struggles to find the

right words to explain how he came to the decision to destroy the photographs:

These things are…crazy. They are so powerful – They’re making everyone act crazy. […] They have

like…an energy and, like, where did they come from? Because I never once saw them here. I never oncesaw Daddy with them. It’s like they came from nowhere. And I was like – maybe they emerged for a

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sons, has moved in with his father Ed after first dropping out of graduate school, and then law school. The

play takes place during the Christmas holidays when Ed’s other two sons, Jake and Drew visit to relax

and spend time with the family; during this break from work and social life, the four men play games,

joke around, sing, dance, decorate the Christmas tree, dress up as Santa Claus, and consume an exorbitant

amount of food. Everything is swell. But then Matt suddenly breaks down crying in the middle of aChinese take-out dinner, which prompts Jake and Drew to delve into Matt’s condition, questioning his

puzzling lack of ambition and his self-professed contentment working as a temporary administrative

assistant at a human rights organization. Drew believes depression is the cause, while Jake makes a more

troubling diagnosis: a debilitating feeling of guilt over white male privilege. Although the play never

sheds light on the truth of Matt’s problem, the bits of information that Lee provides on how these white

men were raised gives weight to Jake’s explanation. In an early scene, Jake and Drew dig up a board

game that they played as boys, a modified version of Monopoly retitled “Privilege.” A relic of late-

twentieth century identity politics, the game features a pile of excuse cards that serve as lessons of

tolerance and social justice. Some of them read: “What I said wasn’t sexist/racist/homophobic because I

was joking.” and, rather on the nose, “I don’t have white privilege because it doesn’t exist” (63). Mattwas the most dedicated of the three to radical identity politics, even establishing “Matt’s School for

Young Revolutionaries” (66). The brothers look back to their home education with fond memories, but it

is clear that these men are not revolutionaries, and that they benefit from a social structure that privileges

whites. (Jake is a banker, and Drew is a professor and award-winning novelist.) Thus, even though these

characters constantly mark themselves as white, disavowing myths of individual effort and transracial

universality, it is uncertain whether making whiteness visible is enough to mitigate white privilege.

Admittedly, Straight White Men asks the audience to think through a rather forced scenario: not all

straight white men are as self-aware and knowledgeable as these characters. But Lee’s work raises

pertinent questions regarding the profusion of identity politics in public discourse and the media, whichmay polarize audiences (potentially engendering post-racial backlash) or prevent deeper engagement with

the politics of whiteness by providing easy textbook answers. Indeed, when Jake starts talking about

Matt’s breakdown in terms of white privilege, Drew interjects: “you sound like an undergrad. Everyone

already knows this stuff. It’s just masturbation” (70). In light of Lee’s ongoing dedication to creating

theatre that makes herself and her audiences uncomfortable, Straight White Men demonstrates that the

political vocabulary of the past is insufficient in tackling whiteness today. Hence realism. In his review

for the New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes, “Believe it or not, Ms. Lee wants us to sympathize

with the inexpressible anguish of her protagonist, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class straight white man

named Matt who has failed to follow the codes of achievement that he’s expected to conform to.”[25] The

prevailing cultural assumptions regarding whiteness make this request for sympathy difficult to believe,yet that is precisely what the conventions of realist drama solicits by focusing so heavily on one

character’s interior struggle. Realism does not ensure that the audience will like Matt, but it does align

them with the other characters as they try to pin down his predicament, to seek closure to Matt’s

emotional arc.

Before the play ends, however, Jake and Drew grow irritated by Matt’s inability to provide closure, and

at the same time provide disclosure (as Barthes discusses regarding conventional realist narrative), to

make himself fully known. When Matt refuses to give a straight answer about anything, Jake explodes

with anger at the idea that his brother is a “loser for no reason”: in other words, an asocial individual

rather than a representative of whiteness (74). Drew, who had believed until now that Matt’s breakdownwas caused by a sense of failure and disappointment with his life, remarks coldly: “Nobody cares about

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your egotistic white male despair!” (75). Unable to sympathize with this “defective” dramatic character,

the other three white men simply give up and exit the stage, leaving Matt “alone, staring out at the

audience” (75). Although Matt’s unfathomable burden stems from whiteness, the final image of the play

suggests that his is somehow different from the whiteness of the other characters. Throughout the play,

Matt is treated as a special case, a “freak” in Jake’s words:

JAKE: […] there’s nothing people like us can do in the world that isn’t problematic or evil, so we have to

make ourselves invisible!

ED: “People like us”? What’s that supposed to mean?

JAKE: You know, privileged white dickheads. Women and minorities may get to pretend they’re doing

enough to make the world a better place just by getting ahead, but a white guy’s pretty hard-pressed to

explain why the world needs him to succeed. So Matt’s trying to stay out of the way.

ED: Jake, you keep saying this, and I find it very hard to believe.

JAKE: That’s because nobody else would ever do it! Matt’s a freak.(74)

Significantly, Jake’s thorough analysis of whiteness only entails intervention in Matt’s special case; the

social privileges enjoyed by the other white characters, while acknowledged, are regarded as an inevitable

and unchangeable effect of the system—just the way things are in the world. By being ostensibly marked

as white, Matt is paradoxically excluded from white “people like us” (74). But because he is only a half-

finished character, lacking closure in the traditional sense, the whiteness that marks him remains

unfamiliar, indeterminate, and not reified. Matt’s unarticulated dilemma suggests a potential fracturing of

whiteness beyond its conventional image as an ideological monolith; to conceive of the possibility of

sympathizing with Matt is to explore its rough and uneven surfaces, even if that means entering

uncomfortable terrain.

To conclude, I would like to return to Lee’s tongue-in-cheek observation that realism is the straight white

man of theatrical genres. The American tradition of realist family drama has been closely associated with

the monopoly of whiteness in theatrical representation; Jacobs-Jenkins’s response to “hearing people

describe the great American family drama” is “‘There are no people of color on these lists.’ Who has

access to this idea of family as a universal theme?”[26] But realism resembles straight white men in

another sense as well. In drama and theatre scholarship, realism is often treated paradoxically as a bully

and a loser at the same time, both overbearing as a vessel of dominant ideology and underachieving as an

aesthetic form—not unlike how straight white men are distorted into easy, abstract targets of criticism. The

critical lens crafted by Diamond and other theorists allows us to see through realism’s smooth surface

and scrutinize its ideological foundations, but as a damaging side effect, this lens has also blinded us tothe form’s untapped potential by presupposing that realism always operates in the same manner.

Appropriate and Straight White Men demonstrate that realism can still be a refreshing and viable form to

explore the politics of representation, and especially the politics of representing whiteness, which has

relied on realist techniques throughout modern history. The first step towards utilizing the potential for

realism to offer such new insight is to move away from the Barthesian framework of myth that has

dominated discussions on realism in the past few decades. As a form that enables myth, realism was

thought in the past to insist on “a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a

world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity.”[27] But Jacobs-Jenkins

and Lee’s dramatic worlds are full of contradictions and hidden layers, despite being inhabited only by

white characters. In place of “blissful clarity,” Appropriate and Straight White Men leave the audiencewith the feeling that they have not seen everything, that realism’s representative scope does not extend

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beyond the walls of the living room onstage.

Kee-Yoon Nahm is a Doctorate in Fine Arts candidate in the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic

Criticism, Yale School of Drama. His current research examines strategies of appropriating cultural

stereotypes in American drama and theatre from 1960 to today, in relation to contemporaneous political

discourse on representation, subversion, and spectatorship. His writings have appeared in Theater ,

Theatre Journal, and the anthology Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. He also works as a

translator and dramaturg.

[1] Appropriate ran at the Signature Center from February to April 2014, following productions in

Louisville, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Straight White Men opened at the Public Theater in November

2014 following its world premiere at the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio and a brief

international tour.

[2] Richard Dyer, White (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 45.

[3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins & Eliza Bent, “Feel that Thought: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Plays Are High-

Wire Performances in Themselves,” Part 1, American Theatre (May/June 2014),http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=7&indexID=44, accessed 28 May2014.

[4] I will provide a more detailed account of this trajectory in Lee’s work later in the discussion.

[5] Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 4-5.

[6] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 142.

[7] Varun Begley, “Objects of Realism: Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, and Marsha Norman,” Theatre

Journal 64, no. 3 (October 2012): 339.

[8] For a more recent reappraisal of dramatic realism than the examples I discuss, see also Jill Dolan,

“Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein,” Theatre Journal, 60,

no. 3 (October 2008): 433-457.

[9] Jeanie Forte, “Realism,Narrative, and the Feminist Playwright – A Problem of Reception” Modern

Drama 32, no.1 (March 1989): 117.

[10] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) 56.

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[11] Ibid., 59.

[12] Dyer, 11.

[13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate, unpublished manuscript, (2014), 46. Used by permission. Allsubsequent references are indicated in parenthesis.

[14] Ben Brantley, “A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark,” New York Times, 16 March 2014.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-jenkins-subverts-

tradition.html, accessed 29 November 2014.

[15] Hilton Als, “GWTW” in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM:

Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) 42.

[16] Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2007) 39.

[17] Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality (San

Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 63–64.

[18] Young Jean Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014.

[19] Young Jean Lee, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (New York: Theatre

Communications Group, 2009) 173.

[20] Ibid., 174.

[21] Ibid., 71.

[22] Dyer, 9.

[23] Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014.

[24] Young Jean Lee, Straight White Men, in American Theatre, unpublished manuscript, April 2015, 70.

Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis.

[25] Charles Isherwood, “My Three Sons and All Their Troubles,” The New York Times. November 18,

2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/theater/straight-white-men-opens-at-the-public-

theater.html?_r=1, accessed 29 November 2014.

[26] Jacobs-Jenkins & Bent, “Feel that Thought.”

[27] Barthes, 143.

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Global Posts



"Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men"

by Kee-Yoon Nahm

ISNN 2376-4236

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre

Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 2015)

©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

Editorial Board:

Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson

Advisory Editor: David Savran

Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve

Editorial Staff:

Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey

Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona

Advisory Board:

Bill Demastes

Amy E. Hughes

Jorge Huerta

Esther Kim Lee

Kim Marra

Beth Osborne

Robert Vorlicky

Maurya Wickstrom

Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee

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Table of Contents

"The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by

Brian Eugenio Herrera

"Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm

"Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter "

by Bradley Stephenson

"Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its

Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks

www.jadtjournal.org

[email protected]

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director

Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications

Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director

©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre CenterThe Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York NY 10016

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Documents

Visibly White: Realism and Race in APPROPRIATE and STRAIGHT WHITE MEN