Reparations by Sound Theatre Company

As I write this, I am listening to Rush on Spotify in remembrance, I suppose, of the band’s drummer, Neil Peart, who died recently, and who wrote these words,

When they turn the pages of history
When these days have passed long ago
Will they read of us with sadness
For the seeds that we let grow?

There is too much to say about Reparations and a country and culture where the seeds of this play have grown.  At the reception afterward, the playwright, the director, the producer and the head of the venue all made the point collectively that telling this story is critical.  The play is determined to tell everything about being Black in America or at least point to what it doesn’t get in.

The play begins with a harrowing scene of the burning of a farmhouse and the brutal, lynching murder of the parents while the children watch.  Among other gut-wrenching things, the young son recognizes the Sheriff, “That’s Bill Peck!” he says.  He says it in a way that you know the kid knows the Sheriff and thinks kindly and well of him, respects the authority of the law he represents.  The betrayal is crushing.  Then comes the deed.  It’s hard to take.

We jump ahead to the near future.  An incident has sparked the State of Oklahoma (!) to establish a commission for reparations.  Rory, a college-aged but not college-going young woman, descendant of the ones who witnessed the atrocity at the farmhouse, is ready to claim what is due.

The near-future setting allows for the use of a great device, literal and literary, of a sort of time machine.  It’s a glass canister, like a giant French press coffee maker, with flashing lights inside.  The state reparations commission uses these canisters while interviewing claimants, like Rory, as a sort of lie-detector.  Using one drop of blood (think about everything that concept entails!) the machine allows Rory to go back in time as a sort of ghost and be present for the things that happened in her family’s past while the reparations commission staffer looks on.  It’s meant to be a way to verify that Rory is a descendant of someone who experienced real trauma and thereby decide how to compensate her.

Of course, digging up the past is fraught.  No one in Rory’s life wants her to do it; not her cousin, who says we all already know what happened because we live it every day; nor her grandmother, who thinks it best to hold it all in, even if it’s killing her. Grandma prefers to sit alone with her pills and her afghans and turn the pages of her bible.  Cousin keeps his dreams in check.

It’s left open whether we can ever hope for reparations, in any sense of the word but maybe there can be healing and a new beginning, even in the face of the impossibility of ever fixing the past.

Pictured: Grandma's chair.  Photo by me.