A Playwright's Experiment with Race

"In the black family, there is a different tempo to the conversation. In the white family, there is a different distance and fragility to touching and contact." -- Playwright Tom Minter

The press release for the play, "Past is Present, Imperfect," offers another quote by Minter: "I wonder. Now that we have a black president, can we tick the box of race and leave it behind as an issue? If not, how do we continue the opportunity of conversation?"

In an effort to answer these questions, Minter wrote a play about a multi-racial family. But to push the experiment farther, he decided to have two separate casts with different racial mixes perform the same play before the same audience, and to compare the performances and the reactions to them.

I asked the directors of the two casts if the era of post-racial theater was upon us. One of them said she didn't think so, while the other didn't like the question, and said race never had anything to do with theater. After the audience watched, there were nervous giggles, as well as carefully chosen words to describe the differences they perceived.

Judge for yourselves.

One of my earlier reports this year looked into how a diverse neighborhood in Washington D.C., still marred by race riots of the past, embraced the swearing-in of a multi-racial president.

Extraordinary Perspectives of the Inauguration

"I am 67 years of age, and I never, never, thought I would live to see this day when a black man became president of these United States." -- Inauguration Attendee

The intent of this vlog (video log) is to mix and match words, audio, pictures and video to tell important, relevant stories about the American experience, in an unscripted style.

For my first posting, I go back to Barack Obama's Inauguration Day on January 20th, 2009, when I braved Washington, D.C.’s bitter cold alongside a million or so people with no access to heated VIP boxes. I rode the crammed public transit system early in the morning, walked through police roadblocks and watched the historic ceremony on big screens set up on the National Mall -- all the while recording some of the stories that people wanted to share.


Other VOA stories that day included Derek Kilner filing a radio spot from Kenya on how residents there celebrated the beginning of the presidency of the first African-American president, whom they also consider a native son, while Jim Malone reported on how the Inaugural celebrations quickly gave way to presidential realities.