#lauri scheyer

Badly Licked Bear on BigBlackOctoberSurprise

“The distance between us is not one of space, but of time.” You have always been here. You were born here. It is likely that you will die here. But you are only sometimes aware of that. Some are more aware - much more - of this truth. It might do you well to listen. The call is coming from inside the house….

BigBlackOctoberSurprise is a story told from a certain interior, the interior of the body. It is told from deep inside the gristly, scarred entrails of the American body politic. Imprisoned within a series of visceral chambers, Outlaw shuffles the deck of past, present, and future, ultimately demanding release not from one’s own body, but from the body politic wherein one was both born and is, ultimately, consumed.

The exterior of this body in which we discover ourselves, whose constant motion abrades us, dissolves us, and ejects that which remains, is beyond our direct experience. Our reality is deep inside, that, even as it grows harder and withers more by the day, the military march of its heart deafens us. It would be generous to name the condition here as twilight. If there is a light at either end of the tunnel, it is a light that will not shine upon our living flesh.

That there is a sweet-scented exterior - the space beyond and the time beyond that which is carceral and corporeal - is known to some, as it is not beyond the dreams and necessity of desire that blossoms in pain as it is passed from body to body for generations. That future demands not that one weather acidic, false-promises of release and salvation, but that our very life - all life - depends on being both indigestible and willing to cut passage to the light, blood-shiny and wet.

Badly Licked Bear was strongly considering wearing a mask for the remainder of their days, during all public life, before it was cool. An avid birdwatcher, they see Black Swans everywhere.

Lauri Scheyer on BigBlackOctoberSurprise

Cryptocurrency—a stand-in for a stand-in—came to mind as I bought “a ticket” from the restricted space of my computer. I wonder how it would have been different to watch the piece, this play about the black male body in restricted spaces and restricting guises, as it was first workshopped, in a theatre. But how better to watch a play about isolation and separation than from our own cells? I thought about witnessing the life squeezed from George Floyd on video—about the positions of onlookers in front of Cup Foods, the police, with their bodycams, or Darnella Frazier. “BBOS” is about the violence of these multiple perspectives; it's about seeing, being-told, and then re-told.

Outlaw tells a different tale of a black man's murder. This time the context is the dirty-secret consensual sex (one of the ironically framed ‘big surprises’ of the title) between an enslaved black man and white plantation owner. The men were observed (surprise!) by the plantation owner’s wife who then surreptitiously (surprise!) ordered the dismemberment and murder of the enslaved man. Being-seen and being-told. We ask what we see and from where, and how this position impacts what we feel and understand.

A white woman opens the play claiming, “I am Paul Outlaw,” but this is not a game show of “true identity,” or the territory of “I am Spartacus” or “We are the World.” Our sense that she is not Paul Outlaw is only intensified by her claim that she is. When we see Paul Outlaw at the end of the play, we have seen him in multiple guises—white woman, Kafkaesque vermin, potent black male body—and in multiple enclosures—a cell, slave quarters, pandemic-era virtual square. Throughout, the black male body is universalized as a perceived instrument of aggression, and at the same time it is almost infant-like in its helplessness and guilelessness—another trope turned on its head. Now, at last, we see the presumably autobiographical Paul Outlaw (or as close to him as we can get), and we understand the extent to which no one can inhabit Paul Outlaw but Paul Outlaw himself.

“You ain’t gonna bother me no more, no how,” Billie Holiday sings, at the beginning and end of the performance, but this remains wishful thinking. We have watched “Paul Outlaw” shape-shift, only to finally become “himself.” And yet we can’t un-forget the  anonymizing and objectifying we've just witnessed.

A command rings in my memory : “Get out of here!” Is it a note-to-self, or a command from outside? My memory is of a body not standing vertically of its own power: the body is crouching, writhing on the ground, in a fetal position, seated in a chair. Big black cock to big black cockroach—their threat and vulnerability. The ambiguity and bivalence of both symbols.

“This is not intermission, by the way, and it’s definitely not the end.” I’m waiting for his next production.

Based in Changsha, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Lauri Scheyer is Xiaoxiang Distinguished Professor and British and American Poetry Center Director at Hunan Normal University. Her most recent books are Theatres of War: Contemporary Perspectives (Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury) and A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge University Press).

BBC: “BigBlackOctoberSurprise” was presented virtually at REDCAT October 22-31, 2020. Concept, performance, and script by Paul Outlaw. Directed by Sara Lyons, with sound by Jonathan Snipes and video by Adam J. Thompson.