April Matthis (right foreground) and “Help” cast, 2022. Photo: Kate Glicksberg. Courtesy The Shed.
Covival, not just survival.
There are many chairs and no tables in this depressingly uplifting play, Help, which is about a new table we need right NOW, “NOW that is the ‘n-word,’” as the play says: a kind of roundtable, virtual and actual, where we can all sit around to talk “us,” cohabitus, especially the souls of White folks.
Simone White, Kyoo Lee, and Gabriel Ojeda-Sague joined Al Filreis to discuss a passage from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. The discussion follows Rankine's extrordinarily synthesis of various huge issues: illness and death, memory loss and the misery of forgetting, the ubiquitous frame-setting of television, incarceration, police violence, useful and useless language, antidepressants, and the poem as a social assertion of “here.”
Dump
