Treat it like a Tragedy

“Do we feel sorry for Othello?”  the professor asks.  The obvious answer is yes.  That’s what makes this a tragedy. And of course, the most prominent characteristic to me that makes it a tragedy is that he fulfills his stereotype.  But I won’t say that.  I won’t say it because she won’t call on me. 

I find it fascinating that I’d spent the last two and a half years here being less than popular.  It doesn’t surprise me.  There are bonds formed between people in the same graduating class that.  I would never break.  There is that thick membrane around the group that I can try to tear but will never break through.  The fascinating part thought was that I was instantly labeled a bitch.  To this day there is no specific situation to site.  Not a real one at least.

One time while working on a production I was sent out of the room, along with another classmate.  She was not happy and proceeded to curse in the hallway and mock everyone who was left in the room we had just been asked to leave.  A year later, someone said that they heard every word I said.  A perfect start to being mistook.

“What makes you feel sorry for him?”  Very predictable answers ensue.  Because Iago is screwing him over.  Because Iago is pretending to be is friend and turning him mad right under his nose.  Because Desdemona is acting so weird what else would he think?  Because he knows that people don’t necessarily approve of his marriage.  In my head I say: Because he becomes the beast people were suspicious of him being.  The manipulation combined with the pressure and pre existing stereotypes set him up to be exactly what they all thought.  My hand starts to get cold from losing blood.  Oh well.

“There is a clear link to racism and incarceration.”  Professor Hames Garcia says in a class of over 120 people.  Oregon was nicknamed the Lily White State.  Misegination laws weren’t banned until 1951.  Miles Davis was already in his Blue Period and different colors still couldn’t marry.  There were exclusion acts for Asians, Hawaiian, and Native Americans in the state of Oregon.  And today you can still see the ignorant flags of the confederacy on pick up trucks there.  I suppose no one has the heart to tell them that they weren’t even a state during the civil war. 

“Do we feel sorry for Richard?”  She asks.  Of course not.  “Why?”  Obvious.  Because he’s getting people killed.  Because he’s greedy for the throne.  Because he only cares about himself.  I read one of soliloquies and he reasons that because he looks like a monster he will play the part of a monster.  This acknowledgement to the stereotype is where the sympathy really drops for me.  Because now, he is taking advantage of his unfortunate looks in a way that empowers him at the expense of hurting others.  Another realization gone unshared.  But not for lack of trying.

“Just in case we seem to loosely connect racism with incarceration, we will look at statistics of arrests made in this state and we will follow these arrests all the way to prison or to court.”  The amount of Arrests for black people in Oregon is horrific.  There’s a huge gap between white and black and what’s more shocking is that black people don’t even make up 20% of the state.    However more than 40% of the black population in Oregon is incarcerated.  Recalling this information now I feel I am aiming low just so I don’t look like I’m being dramatic.

I sit down in the Dean’s office and I can’t figure out whats going on.  I’m not being cast and I haven’t even been able to help on a show.  I can’t even get a position to pull a curtain open.  I don’t understand.  “My understanding of you Amanda as a student is that the faculty views you in a way that you think you know everything.  Therefore they perceive you as unteachable. “  I cried and she buffered the situation by seeing that I obviously wanted to be a part of this department and that perhaps it wasn’t true that I was unteachable.  I later tried to get into her class.  Twice.  No dice.

“What makes the Merchant of Venice a comedy.”  People get married.  The principle characters live happily ever after.  I am disgusted.  The crux of forming this comedy was based on the placement of a jewish man in a world full of Christians.  Now that’s comedy.  That’s like all the cliché movie scenes of putting a man ina room full of women or putting a white guy in a black club.  Yawn.  However, it doesn’t really start offending me until I see the title “The Jew of Venice”.  As the class progresses, I find that people are losing sympathy of Shylock when he openly admits, “I hate him for he is Christian.”  The slander on Antonio’s behalf is completely overlooked the moment Shylock says this.  And people furthermore overlook his forced conversion and the losso f his property, his money, all future profits, and his daughter.  What a laugh.  What even moreso baffles me is that the reason Shylcok is a Merchant in the first place is because Jews were not allowed to legally do certain business.  They were restricted to things as such as merchants.  And the only way to make a living was to charge interest, which was frowned upon by Christians.  But all we can do in this class is see the greedy Jew scream “My daughter, my ducats!”

The day before opening night, I lost it.  I lost it all.  I had finally gained my opportunity.  With all the patience I could muster up I finally got the position.  I was lighting designer for a mainstage production.  A BIG show.  But somehow, as there always was, I sensed some underlying attention.  I couldn’t tell why. I had been calm and polite the entire time.  Even when I was given pages upon pages of notes.  Even when I was talked to like a child.  Even when my ideas were shot down without even trying them.  Even when I sensed I was being overshadowed.  I kept my cool.  This resulted in more abuse.  There was a comfort in knowing that people could continue to treat me like this and I would stay calm.  Finanlly when being asked a question that turned out to be rhetorical, I finally spoke up.  “Why are you asking me like it’s a real question when you are going to make me change the answer I give you?  Just tell me what the right answer is.”  It wasn’t a serious argument or yelling match but it was enough for people to stop talking to me. The biggest outburst during tech week was the choreographer, who slammed her computer on the desk and stormed out.  I started to get upset because I had made a lot of progress.  So many people had stopped talking to me and a couple people were added to help me stay on task and I got so much accomplished.  In that two day period I feared that people would credit the presence of others and not the silence to the success of the show.  The day before opening night, the fear was confirmed when someone asked one of my helpers for permission to make a lighting change.  It was clear that I hadn’t gained anything.  It was clear that these people had set me up to fail.  And to top it all off, when I didn’t someone else got credit for it.  I couldn’t scream.  I couldn’t yell.  Because I would become the monster they all thought I was.  I calmly walked away, waited for my helper to see me, handed him my notes and walked off calmly.  

“The worst part about the blatant discrimination in California real estate during this time period is that real estate agents were determining successful and failed communities based on who they would sell property to.  As a result, banks would relocate if the minority population grew too large.”    Colors moved in property value was lost.  Value was lost in enough property, banks would move.  Banks, would move, economy in the community deteriorated.  Poverty moves in, and violence and theft increases.  Pretty soon you have a run of the mill ghetto.  And if you’re the 94 years old white lady who saw the first black person move in 5 years ago, you feel so powerful in knowing that you called this town going down the drain. 

I returned back into the room shortly after.  The director was in tears.  The choreographer had a sour face but pretended to be sympathetic.  “We’re so sorry you don’t feel appreciated.  We just don’t know what to do.  You are so hard to read.  And we feel like we are stepping on eggshells for you.  And we don’t want to say the wrong things.”  I felt as if everything they said to me was the wrong thing.

After we opened, a small piece of negativity came up to my helpers after the show and asked who was really responsible for the design.  My helper was straightforward and set the record straight.  He later told me about the encounter.  I’d had enough.  I approached her and just as I was about to tell her to mind her business and where she could take her peeving little questions, I stopped. I told her calmly that it was my design and that her negativity was not needed.  She would not be my Desdemona.  No one was going to feel sorry for her and no one was going to demonize me.  I could feel it starting to.  The day before opening night I wanted to walk into the light booth rip the disk with my design on it and burn it in the street.  But instead I treated it like a tragedy and cried.