FAIRVIEW at The Justice Theater Project

Nothing is what it seems in this comic, challenging, and searing 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama. The committee called the play "a hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors' community to face deep-seated prejudices." In Fairview, the Frasier family prepares for Grandma’s birthday, but not everything goes according to plan, and things quickly go in unexpected directions for both the characters and the audience. What begins as a seemingly pleasant, playful examination of a blatantly stereotyped African-American family morphs into a scalpel-sharp commentary on racism, prejudice, and white privilege. The play’s eventual destruction of the fourth wall delivers themes brazenly to its audience in an unforgettable theatre event. The show’s concept came from conversations with director Sarah Benson, Sibblies Drury says. "We were both interested in thinking about surveillance and why it affects people of color in a deeper way," she says. "And this idea of being watched by someone as a person of color — there is automatically some sort of sense of suspicion, especially if the watcher is a white person. And so we started from a place of trying to create what in the theater felt like a normal black family, and then introducing the idea of someone watching that family — and that watching [changes] their behavior and the course of their lives."

Authors

• Jackie Sibblies Drury