Education & Engagement with the Negro Ensemble Company
Accelerator Program Theatre World Premieres
In the weeks before opening night, Penn Live Arts teaching artist Jourdan Howland-Townsend visited West Philadelphia High School, First Philadelphia Preparatory Charter and Conwell Middle Magnet School to prepare students for what they would see at the Student Discovery matinee. Because Day of Absence is performed by Black actors in whiteface, Jordan introduced the concepts of minstrelsy and reverse minstrelsy and asked students to explore what it means to be dependent on something. Students prepared short sketches demonstrating what it would be like to live for a day “without” something they deemed essential; their lists ranged from immediate and concrete (phones) to abstract and systemic (capitalism).
Negro Ensemble Company actors Gil Tucker and Kenya Wilson, who together played four roles in Day of Absence, also met with Sayre High School’s after-school theatre club for a Q&A with students. Tucker and Wilson answered questions about the life of an actor – what it was like to audition, whether they had fun performing, what some frustrations could be – and wider-ranging aspects of the business, including what other jobs in the theatre helped them do their best work.
Back on campus, both Penn students and members of the public had a chance to learn more about the production’s artistic choices and reflect on the play’s content. Students in Margit Edwards’s Introduction to Theatre Arts class enjoyed a visit from epilogue playwright Cris Eli Blak. (Day of Absence has historically been performed with a companion piece; it was paired with Ward’s Happy Ending the 1965 premiere and Brotherhood at a 1970 Off-Broadway revival). Blak led students in a monologue exercise and talked about his writing process in conversation with Ward’s piece.
After the Friday evening performance, Dr. Herman Beavers moderated a post-show discussion with Wilson, Tucker, Blak and director Patricia Floyd, prompting spirited audience testimony. After Saturday’s matinee, representatives from the SNF Paideia program facilitated small-group discussions for audience members, focusing on the motifs of invisible labor, Black and white identity, and the role of genre and humor in communicating the play’s message. After talking in smaller groups, participants came back together and shared the impact their conversations had had. A few white participants shared that they had encountered the play for the first time and felt that they’d had a window onto an important juncture in Black American culture. Some Black participants shared a sense of recognition, inside jokes and the feeling that Ward’s play had been written specifically for a Black audience – a notion Ward himself explored.
In a New York Times op-ed written shortly after the play’s premiere, Ward wrote, “For a Negro playwright, the need is for an audience of other Negroes.” During the first run of Day of Absence, he wrote the majority Black audience provided “freshness of response, immediacy of involvement, spontaneity of participation” which “provided crucial illuminations for others.” His suggestion was that an audience, when it meets a work created especially for them, becomes a co-creator in its final iteration and meaning. Though Ward could not have had the audiences of today in mind when he created Day of Absence, the participants in each of our engagement programs certainly became co-creators of the work, both individually and together.
