How do you write dramas about dystopia and alienation in the middle of a pandemic, especially when the people in charge have seemingly signed a blood oath to a nihilist death cult? Isn’t doomscrolling Twitter enough to make most of us imagine the worst?
Langford was inspired in part by Westinghouse’s 1930s foray into creating prototype robots designed to look like Black men—one of whom was actually named “Rastus” and was also referred to as a “mechanical slave.” As Simone Browne, a professor of African and African Diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin notes in a 2017 presentation, Rastus’s cartoonish appearance fit with advertising images and other representations of Black people in popular culture. “These exaggerated representational practices worked to rationalize the economic exploitation of Black domestic workers, as well as those who labored in low-paying conditions in the service sector,” said Browne. (That economic exploitation has come into sharper focus as the pandemic has hit Black essential workers especially hard.)
But the epigenetics thread weaves itself like a double helix through the story, reminding us that while Langford’s framing may be fantastical, the traumas of racism are not. Yet Needra’s initial impulse to “level the playing field by removing the trauma at a microlevel” may, as she comes to discover, carry its own problematic form of erasure.
Wallace delivers a mesmerizing performance (sometimes in extreme close-up) under Elly Green’s precise direction. Like Mr. Robot, Charlie’s story takes place against a backdrop of capitalism melting down, and yet he’s fighting back like a cornered animal. And like Elliot, we’re well aware we’re in the company of a narrator who is beyond unreliable, but who still wins our empathy through his palpable pain. There are echoes of genocidal impulses in the attitudes of Mrs. Winter’s son, who believes the gangs of “feral” children in the neighborhood should be hunted like, well, foxes.
Rastus and Hattie: Through 10/24, Thu-Fri 7 PM, Sat 4 PM (available other times by appointment), 16thstreettheater.org, pay what you can.Run the Beast Down: Through 11/1, available anytime on Vimeo, strawdog.org, pay what you can ($5 minimum; a portion of the proceeds benefit lakeviewpantry.org).
