Here is the transcription of my most recent video blog:
(And here’s the audio on AnchorFM)
Hey everyone, it’s Queen Mab, coming at you with another review of a show from the 2021 Hollywood Fringe Festival, and that show is “Lady Libertease,” written and performed by Kirsten Laurel Caplan…another outstanding solo show.
And I like this show because this is a show where a white person is talking to other white people about racism, and she’s doing it through sharing her own experiences and her own process and her own mistakes. The show is about Kirsten searching for strong historical female role models in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and she comes across the goddess Columbia, who was an early personification of the United States of America kind of like Marianne is the personification of the French Republic, okay – similar concept. And this goddess Columbia was sort of in use until I think around World War I, and that was when she sort of disappeared, and Kirsten goes on this quest to learn more about her and discovers that actually, there’s some pretty racist history that’s attached to the goddess Columbia. And then she’s grappling with her, on the one hand, her whiteness and her privilege, and then on the other hand, she is a woman and she is oppressed, and how to walk that line and how to balance that.
So the show reminds me of a book that I like called Waking Up White by Debby Irving. And like Kirsten, Debby Irving tells her story of growing up very sheltered and clueless and not knowing anything about racism and exclusion in the United States, and then getting a rude awakening, and then what her journey looked like and the mistakes that she made and all of that. And I personally think that if white people are going to talk to other white people about racism, that’s the way to do it is to say, “This is me. These are my mistakes. This is my journey. This is my process.”
The book that gets the most attention when it comes to white people talking to other white people about racism is Robin DiAngelo’s book “White Fragility.” Now, she makes very, very important points in that book, and I don’t want to discount that. And – I think that book would be more effective if she would talk about it more through the lens of her own experience. She does a little bit; there are a few times where she gives some examples of mistakes that she’s made, and for me, those were the most helpful parts of the book. A lot of that book, though, just came across as, “BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD!” And so that’s why I don’t think it was the most effective.
So if you’re a white person wanting to learn more about racial justice and you know, the sort of, the white American history of what it is to be of European descent in this country, I would say start with Debby Irving’s book, and then I would say check out Kirsten’s show. She’s going to do it again at the Binge Fringe festival, which is free in October, and that’s happening at the Santa Monica Playhouse. And I don’t know what the streaming situation is there, so I’ll keep you posted on that. But thank you, Kirsten, for your show; I really enjoyed it. And my show is also going to be happening at Binge Fringe in October, so I will keep everyone posted on that.
And then the last thing I want to tell everyone before I go is – I am going to post my first interview with an actor named Johnathan Clauser. And we talked on Tuesday, and I’ve got to finish transcribing and promoting and everything. But it’s a really interesting interview, and he talked about the reason that he’s in acting, is that he loves to create worlds. And that was a really interesting conversation, so I hope that you’ll tune in for that. I’m planning to release it on Tuesday…whatever number day that is…and I hope to see you all then. So thanks again for tuning in, and I’ll see you tomorrow.