A reaction to "We Are Proud to Present a Presentation!",

"We Are Proud to Present a Presentation!" was an arts Emerson play production I recently saw in Boston and the following was my reaction to it.

Reaction: I would have to give a mixed review about the play. Not so much in the sense that I felt it was mediocre, I just have highly contrasting opinions about the play. The start of the play wasn’t uninteresting. The very upfront, silly, and jovial characters giving an intro to their presentation was something I was lightly tickled by, but only for a little while. After about 15 minutes of these presenters trying to get into character I found myself picking at my nails. I was bored; there is only so much I’m going to invest in this play as an audience member. In the beginning they flat out tell you that they are going to talk to you about the herrero. Yet, the first 30 minutes are either A) talking about how they aren’t getting into character B)How much they dislike the letters their play is based on or C) Ridiculous exercises to help themselves get into character. This made for a pretty lousy intro and I was left uninterested. The play did eventually pick up though. I think the moment I became interested was the moment I started actually seeing what this play was about, which was around the time they were bickering who was to play the grandmother, which was right around when they were all arguing why white man couldn’t play a Namibian. After that I was very interested, mainly because that’s an issue that remains today. I was interested at pretty much every moment of the play after that. The only thing I disliked afterwards was the dying scene when white man shot black man 8 times in a long drawn out fashion. Otherwise the ending was very powerful. All between the almost seamless transition between the Herero genocide to slavery in the U.S. and the long 15 minute silence at the end of the play I was completely involved and struck with the incredibly heavy questions these characters were asking to the point where I couldn’t speak. In all the play was quite interesting in its entirety, and very powerful in its ending, but was very slow to pick up and had a poor introduction of its characters that, though funny at first, dragged on without interesting substance for quite some time.

What is this piece about?: It is about a group of actors who were trying to accurately portray the herero genocide in Namibia via utilisation and reading of letters written by German soldiers.

What the piece is also about: A group of people facing the trials, difficulties, quarrels, and disputes that come with trying to interpret, empathize with and witness a tragic incident (herrero genocide/slavery).

Questions I think the Company wanted to impress upon the crowd:

How do I feel about the fact that Slavery and Genocide happened?

How do I feel about people trying to interpret a culture that is supposedly my own?

Are people allowed to try and interpret such horrific events?

Should we be allowed to compare tragedies?

How do we feel about our/other races considering both the happenings of traumatic and race specific events and present day reactions/interpretations/empathy to those events?