Margaret Laurena Kemp and Janni Younge: The Bluest Eye

An Essay by Paulette Richards

According to PEN America, legislators in 38 states have introduced 155 bills restricting what teachers can say or teach in their classrooms (Gabbatt, 2022). Between September 2020 and September 2021, the American Library Association (ALA) tracked a 67% increase in the number of attempts to ban school library books (Ujiyedin, 2021). Despite Toni Morrison’s status as a Nobel Prize laureate, her debut novel, The Bluest Eye, regularly appears on the ALA’s list of most-frequently-banned books. Yet director Margaret Laurena Kemp feels strongly that this is a story that must continue to be told.  So as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum in the pre-pandemic era, she undertook to mount a stage version at the University of California, Davis, where she is a professor in the Theatre and Dance department.  

Kemp chose to mount The Bluest Eye at the request of one of the few Black students in her program who praised the book as her favorite novel. Entering her senior year, this talented actor had never had the opportunity to take a lead role because the department had not selected plays with parts for people or color or even opted for colorblind casting. In March 2018, as Kemp was developing the production, Sacramento police officers fired twenty rounds into Stephon Clark, killing the 22-year-old, who was standing in his grandmother’s backyard at the time. The officers claimed they believed the cellphone Clark had in his hand was a gun. Although Kemp received permission to update Lydia Diamond’s 2007 script so that the action of the play would reflect the protagonist Claudia’s efforts to process such traumatic memories, there were not enough African-American student actors at Davis to fill all the roles.

While traveling in South Africa, Kemp had been deeply impressed with the use of puppets in the Truth and Reconciliation process. She, therefore, decided to use puppets in her production of The Bluest Eye. In addition to solving her casting problem, this choice also provided an opportunity for creating a powerful pedagogical experience. Thus, she recruited Janni Younge to design the puppets and co-direct the show. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville Mézières, France, Younge had built puppets and served as the Assistant Director for Handspring Puppet Theater’s Ubu and the Truth Commission. In the process of learning to build and manipulate the Bunraku-style puppets Younge created for The Bluest Eye, the multi-ethnic cast of students absorbed profound lessons about the Black experience in America and about working together to manipulate puppets representing African-American characters. Although Kemp and Younge did not always see eye to eye, still they consciously modeled for the students how they could disagree but continue to work together towards the same goal. The Bluest Eye premiered at UC Davis in May 2018. Along the way the students coalesced as a community and helped raise money to reprise the show at the University of Oregon as part of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in February 2019, where the production garnered four national citations. 

The phase of the journey that brought the show to the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival was another long, steep climb. The COVID-19 pandemic suspended live theater for the better part of two years. On May 25, 2020, Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Floyd in full view of a young citizen journalist, who recorded Floyd’s cries on cellphone video, sparking demonstrations and civil unrest across the country and around the world. Then the loser of the intensely divisive presidential election insisted, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the results were fraudulent and incited his followers to attempt armed insurrection at the Capitol building. These events spurred a national reckoning with inconvenient truths, as well as a concerted campaign of denial from a network of at least 165 local and national groups aiming to disrupt lessons on race and gender equity that they erroneously conflated with “critical race theory (CRT)” (Kingkade, Zadrozny & Collins, 2021). 

Traveling, rehearsing and performing before live audiences in Chicago during the Omicron surge of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic presented even more challenges for Kemp’s Bluest Eye team. By this time the original cast members had all graduated and moved on with their lives. The festival version of the play required a smaller cast, so Kemp ended up shifting to an all-female production. Since the stage was smaller, many of the moveable set pieces that functioned as performing objects in the original show had to be left behind, and reanimating the long-dormant theater in the DuSable Black History Museum required additional energy from the cast and crew. The revival drew heavily on the pedagogical exercises Kemp had developed for the UC Davis production.

Kemp’s pedagogical process began with reading. Every cast member read Morrison’s original novel in addition to Diamond’s script adaptation before beginning to imagine the show as a visual storytelling experience. They had weeks and weeks of conversations about race and representation. Opponents of CRT regard such conversations as pretexts for shaming individual whites as racists, yet CRT is a complex methodology that examines how the legal underpinnings of systemic racism in the US produces inequity without individual racist intent. Mastering the subtleties of this analytical approach normally requires graduate-level training, so most K-12 and undergraduate curricula do not apply it. Rather than exacerbating division, reading Morrison’s contested text and moderating frank discussions about race and gender inequity enabled Kemp and her students to build a cohesive community. 

Establishing community agreements was essential before the cast ever picked up a puppet. Making room for apologies and space for individuals to step back if they had made an error was one of the most important agreements. The cast was multiracial, but the company realized it was important not to assume identity. For example, during the talk-back after the performance on January 28, one of the cast members responded to a question about the decision to use an all-female cast by pointing out that one of the cast members identifies as nonbinary, although their gender is not visibly marked. Indeed Kemp stresses that the show developed over an extended period of time, so there was space for students to maintain “a simmering pot in the room of things that are troubling them.” She encouraged them to check in with their feelings and add one-word notes to a constellation board so there would be an ongoing language-based conversation about the challenges of doing the work.

Kemp recognized that voice would be the first challenge in the performance. Michael North coined the term “racial ventriloquism” to describe American Modernists’ experimentation with Black dialect in his 1993 monograph, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Patricia J. Williams, one of the architects of CRT, subsequently popularized the term as the title for a review of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace that appeared in The Nation on June 17, 1999. During a roundtable discussion on race and representation in puppetry that was held as part of the festival, Kemp relayed that she was not surprised that actors came to the auditions voicing the characters with what she called “sonic blackface.” She would stop them and instruct, “Just say the words in your voice.” In recent years puppet artists and scholars have recoiled at the history of blackface minstrel puppet performances and questioned whether it is appropriate for puppeteers to manipulate and voice material characters that represent racial identities distinct from their own. Kemp, however, felt that the power of Morrison’s language combined with the puppets could make room for anyone to enter. “We are engaging with these puppets as talismans that allow us to help each other to tell the story,” she explains.

Just as talismans are objects believed to hold spiritual powers, Kemp deployed the puppets as repositories of memory and conceived of the show as a healing space for confronting and reintegrating traumatic history. Like the traumatic memories they reenact, the life-sized puppets are heavy. Coordinating their movements between three operators required concentrated physical effort. The subject matter was equally taxing from an emotional standpoint. Kemp was therefore careful to restrict rehearsals of challenging scenes, such as Cholly’s incestuous rape of Pecola, to once a week so that the performers would not be traumatized.

While some puppet professionals in the audience felt that the cast would have benefitted from more training in manipulating the puppets, the puppets’ movements were engaging.  Audiences were deeply moved. They continued to ruminate on the story for days afterwards. While talk backs after the show opened the door to ongoing truth and reconciliation conversations, Kemp’s pedagogical process for staging Morrison’s unflinching gaze at the reality of Black life in the US potentially offers an even more have the opportunity to not only view this production but also to work together while learning to wield books (and puppets) as talismans of truth.