I was definitely feeling something at the end of Blue Door, but it wasn’t necessarily satisfaction. I was left with a lingering something: a desire to probe the questions asked by the play, but also the need to challenge some of its core ideas. Perhaps it was Tanya Barfield’s intention to make her audience squirm a little, to make us slightly uncomfortable about the way we view race and race relations. However, when the play concluded and the protagonist, Lewis, finally seemed to embrace his heritage, I wasn’t ready to embrace it with him.
In Blue Door, Lewis (who is played by David Eulus Wiles), is an African American math professor who has found himself unsettlingly alone after his white wife divorced him because he refused to participate in the Million Man March. As he paces around his house, trying to resist the insomnia that plagues him, he is visited by the spirits of his ancestors (all played by Eric Avery). These ancestors try to get Lewis to acknowledge his roots and embrace his "blackness."
My main beef with the play is that education, success, and productivity seemed to be equated with "denying one’s blackness." It made me uncomfortable to see Lewis’ ancestors admonishing him for being involved in "white academia." Yes, Lewis took his pursuit of excellence to an extreme, but I did not think he deserved such harsh abuse. I was left wondering, "Where is the middle ground? Can’t a person be both black and successful?"
To be fair, as a white woman I can never exactly see the world in the same way that an African-American man might see it. I cannot relate to the experience Lewis had when a fellow professor stared at his hands as if afraid that he might strike her with them. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be burdened with a history of whippings, lynchings, and back-breaking labor. I do not, however, think it is wrong for Lewis to study mathematics and read Herman Melville. Furthermore, Melville hailed from a time when women were oppressed as well. Why can women today read literature from male-dominated time periods and dabble in the traditional spaces of white men without feeling guilty?
Don’t get me wrong. I think it is important to acknowledge who you are and to remember your roots and family history. I also think we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and we should not be afraid to reach for bigger and better things. I do not honestly believe that Tanya Barfield meant to say that African Americans should not be successful, but I think she was simply too hard on Lewis. There was a schism between her characters that was much too sharp. One the one hand, there was Lewis, a hard working, intelligent, very successful math professor who refused to acknowledge his blackness. On the other hand, there was Rex, Lewis’ not-so-successful brother who died of a drug overdose. Where was the character that was both black and successful? In the end, Lewis seemed to finally "get it" and stopped repressing his past. At this point, however, he had already messed up his teaching career because paranoia about his blackness in a white world provoked him to yell at an innocent student.
Although I didn’t necessarily agree with some of its assertions, Blue Door did have some heart-wrenching, conscience-jerking moments. Lewis’ ancestors spun poignant tales about struggling in a cruel and overwhelmingly white world. Avery did an excellent job portraying the hardships of Lewis’ ancestors and the unjust treatment of African Americans as slaves and as "free" men. His performance was most haunting when he sang in a stunning, clear voice the Ancestor’s Song. "Baba agba, iya agba,mo pe o." Grandfather, Grandmother, I call on you.
Despite its pessimistic tone, Blue Door ended on a somewhat positive note. Lewis finally manages to acknowledge and make peace with the ancestors that haunted him throughout the play. Instead of struggling against his inner voices, Lewis gives in and starts working in cadence with his ancestors as they paint a door together, singing with each stroke. Lewis finally grasped the importance of his heritage, but I left hoping that he would also not deny his own success-filled past. A blue door is said to keep the night terrors out, but you have to leave the house sometime.
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