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Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight

White Men
Dead white males. This oft-cited phrase encapsulates the ongoing project of dismantling the privileged
monopoly that white men have historically held over the formation of an artistic canon and cultural
tradition. In the field of American drama, Eugene ONeill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller
(despite significant differences among their work) comprise such a tradition, one that elevates the realist
family drama over other forms of theatrical representation and underlines the centrality of the white male
voice in both the imagined domestic settings and the actual public sphere. Through its prominence in
theatre programming and education, realism continues to hold influence on how plays are written and
received in the United States, evident not only in recent Pulitzer Prize winners such as Tracy Lettss
August: Osage County (2007) and Bruce Norriss Clybourne Park (2010), but also in designations such as
alternative, experimental, or avant-garde theatre, which generally refer to aesthetics that are
opposed to realism. This essay examines two recent plays that engage with this problematic tradition,
albeit from an unconventional angle that probes and challenges existing representations of whiteness:
Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss Appropriate and Young Jean Lees Straight White Men, which were both
produced in New York in 2014.[1] On the surface, these plays stand out from the established institution
that realist family drama has become in that they were written by an African-American and AsianAmerican respectively, challenging normative assumptions about the kinds of plays that playwrights of
color can or should write. But in light of Jacobs-Jenkins and Lees previous, critically acclaimed work on
racial identity and representation, the conscious choice to adoptor more fittingly, appropriatethis
seemingly orthodox aesthetic warrants deeper analysis. As such, this essay attempts to explain how
Appropriate and Straight White Men disrupt the traditional link between realism and whiteness: in
other words, how the purposeful emulation (rather than the rejection and dismantlement) of realist
dramaturgy and stagecraft can highlight issues of racial representation, even when the form has a long and
problematic history of shrouding whiteness in the myth of universality.
It was in the work of feminist critics that realism was first associated with the Barthesian notion of myth
as an ideological institution. To theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Catherine Belsey, and Jill Dolan (among
many others), realism in mainstream cinema, literature, and theatre mystified a patriarchal value system,
normalizing and universalizing the male gaze and the objectification of women by masquerading as an
unmediated and natural account of reality. Following the feminist model of cultural analysis, critical race
studies has demonstrated how an ideology of whiteness is reinscribed through media
representationsprivileging identification with white characters and the gaze of white audiences, while
stereotyping non-whites to a handful of recognizable roles and scenarios. Prior to its critical scrutiny by
cultural theorists, whiteness maintained a mythic status; to be white means to not be seen in terms of
embodied race, to be regarded only as unmarked, unspecific, universal.[2] Thus demystifying whiteness
in dramatic realism involves asking, for example, to what extent Death of a Salesman reflects the
aspirations, struggles, and tragedy of the common man when Millers professed commonality fails to
extend beyond white people. Jacobs-Jenkins explains that his initial interest in emulating realist
dramaturgy for Appropriate emerged from asking, what is the gulf between [Sam Shepards] Buried
Child and August Wilson? I went back and read every family drama I could get my hands on, and after a
while I realized they are actually all about race or ethnicity or identity. They all are but they never get
credited as that.[3] While still acknowledging that whiteness functions differently from other formations
of racial identity, Jacobs-Jenkins attempts in his play to mark whiteness as a race, undermining its claim

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to transracial universality by making it visible. Lee engages in a similar project, although the white
characters in Straight White Men are strikingly different from more stylized renditions of whiteness in her
earlier pieces such as Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (2003) and Songs of the Dragons Flying
to Heaven (2006).[4]
In sum, myth is present in the American dramatic canon in two ways that are relevant to my reading of
these ostensibly white plays. American realist drama since ONeill largely preserved the mythic status of
whiteness, equating white with human while excluding or marginalizing non-white experiences,
subjectivities, and modes of spectatorship. At the same time, whiteness becomes myth most effectively
through the form of realism. Elin Diamond writes:
realism, more than any other form of theatre representation, mystifies the process of theatrical
signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism
operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an
objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if
it argues with) the arrangements of that world.[5]
Diamonds theoretical work on mimesis, with realism as its most rigidified version, translates Barthess
definition of myththe task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making
contingency appear eternalinto one that is specific to the conditions and contexts of theatrical
representation.[6] The critical vocabulary developed by feminist criticism on spectatorship and
identification cover some of theatres unique conditions. We may also include here Varun Begleys
extension of Diamonds theory to objects on stage, in which the fully rendered living room sets and
realistic props (the epithetic kitchen-sink) of stage realism serve as ideological guarantors that help
reinforce the truth effect of the theatrical representation: Conventional realism proclaims what things
are, rather than exploring how they might be appropriated and used.[7] The overbearing presence of
material things in Appropriate and Straight White Men fulfill the expectations of realist stagecraft, but
when whiteness is highlighted, the socio-economic dimensions of these objects (property, the inheritance
of wealth and social status, relationships to labor and leisure, etc.) also stand out. These twin principles
outlined by previous scholarship will be crucial to my analysis: realism mystifies both itself (by replacing
theatrical representation with an objective world) and racial hegemony (by replacing whiteness with
universality).
That said, the parenthetical aside in the last clause of Diamonds quote introduces a difficult problem to
the framework of realism and (de)mystification. She concedes that realism inevitably reinscribes the
dominant ideology even when the intention is to challenge it. While Diamond sought to develop an
analytical method that moved beyond the compromised politics of realist dramaturgy (which she calls
gestic criticism), other scholars have attempted to qualify myth-based critiques of realism to account
for realist plays that do not, in their view, reinforce hegemony.[8] Using the example of Terry Baum and
Carolyn Meyers play Dos Lesbos (1980), which takes the form of realist drama but advances a radical
feminist/lesbian perspective, Jeanie Forte attempts to identify a feminist writing practice that emulates
realism but operates as a different discursive strategy, perhaps a pseudo-realism.[9] Similarly, Josephine
Lee argues that the critical discourse on realism and ideology must be revised when dealing with AsianAmerican family dramas that adhere to conventional realism. Not only do the plays of Frank Chin and
David Henry Hwang work against a sense of mastery, of total identification, for either the Asian
American or non-Asian American viewer, they also provide opportunities of spectatorship that support

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rather than oppose moments of sympathetic identification.[10] Forte and Lee believe that realist
dramaturgy can engender a sense of belonging and political purpose for minority groups when placed in
the right hands, contrary to Diamonds assertion that realism can only reinforce and mystify. But it seems
to me that these counterarguments rely on the assumption that such plays feature characters and audiences
that both belong to the minority group in question: that the Chinese-American families depicted in Chin
and Hwangs plays speak to Chinese-Americans in the audience. Only in this setting can something as
inimical as sympathetic identification (which plays a crucial role in how ideology is reinforced,
according to earlier theorists) can be recuperated to authenticate through public performance a vision of
ethnic community hitherto erased from public view.[11]
But how, then, are we to understand the all-white casts in Appropriate and Straight White Men? Strictly
speaking, these plays couch the lives and perspectives of white characters within a mode of representation
that subtly instates the stage as a reflection and extension of reality. Do these works still qualify as pseudorealism, in other words, appropriations of realism that avoid its ideological pitfalls? I wish to make the
case that they do, which requires a further revision of the critical discourse on realism and myth. Unlike
earlier dramatic appropriations of realist dramaturgy, Jacobs-Jenkins and Lee are not interested in
divorcing form and ideology; instead, they acknowledge and make full use of the historical affinity
between whiteness and realism. That is, the conventionality of realism itself can highlight issues of race
not by satirizing or parodying whiteness, but by rigorously embodying it. Indeed, what makes these plays
so innovative and potentially radical as artistic interrogations of whiteness is the fact that they are not
parodies. Some of the characters are unlikeable, but not necessarily because they are white. They are not
caricatured vessels of dominant ideology, but rather individuals: struggling, confused, and emotionally
torn. After all, if the privilege of being white in white culture is not to be subjected to stereotyping in
relation to ones whiteness, then reducing whiteness into a stereotype is subverting it without probing
the full extent of the white culture that guarantees that privilege.[12] Instead, these plays surprisingly ask
the audience for old-fashioned sympathetic identification towards their white characters, even as they
draw attention to the privileged, unequal position that whiteness has and continues to occupy in American
society.
White supremacism, the most extreme manifestation of whiteness as ideology, literally forms the
background of Jacobs-Jenkinss Appropriate, set in a derelict manor in southern Arkansas that was once a
slave plantation. Following the death of the estates owner Ray Lafayette, his three estranged children, all
middle-aged, return to their old family home to take stock of the property and auction it off to repay their
fathers steep debts. The past works on the present as the familys long and painful history emerges
through expository recollections and mutual accusations of past misdeeds in typical realist style. Yet the
characters are cautious and defensive when the past that they dig up touches upon the history of racism.
Toni, the eldest daughter, is especially averse to admitting that the disturbing artifacts that they find in
their fathers bookshelves and closets mean anything, although she repeatedly insists on remembering the
past to emphasize how much she has suffered and sacrificed to keep the family from falling apart. Franz,
the youngest, returns unexpectedly after running away ten years ago after he was convicted of child rape
to seek emotional closure and start a new life. His fiance, River, encourages Franz to forget the past
without acknowledging the racial legacy enmiring the crumbling house: This place is still in your bones
and you need to let it go. And, tomorrow, when you see its gone, youll be free. Itll become someone
elses problem and youll be able to sleep again.[13]
Before examining how these characters and their juxtaposition against the houses history engage with

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issues of whiteness, it is important to note that the Lafayette siblings are fully-realized and emotionally
complex (if somewhat over-expressive) people, molded from the same cast of conventional realism. Ben
Brantley of the New York Times notes that Jacobs-Jenkins has achieved the difficult feat of making them
all both unlovable and impossible not to identify with, meaning that the play does not treat these white
characters as physical stand-ins for an abstract racial construction.[14] Such a concrete foundation of
realist characterization is vital to how Jacobs-Jenkins then makes their whiteness salientthrough their
interaction with an old photograph album depicting lynchings of black men. The albums spatial journey,
discovered by accident on the living room shelf and passing through the hands of every character over the
course of the play, creates a secondary plot that runs parallel to the family conflict among the Lafayette
siblings; the range of responses to this document of racist violenceshock, disgust, curiosity, fascination,
disregard, aversionis as diverse as the characters inclinations and perspectives on more personal
matters. Yet despite such individualized responses, the photographs mark all of the characters as white, as
people that have never experienced the discrimination and violence that Hilton Als describes in his essay
on actual lynching photographs: Fact is, if you are even half-way colored and male in America, the dead
heads hanging from the trees in these pictures, and the dead eyes or grins surrounding them, its not too
hard to imagine how this is your life too, as it were.[15]
Whiteness becomes apparent when these characters are unable to imagine the terminated lives in the
photographs. Toni refuses to believe that the photographs are even a part of her fathers life, arguing
throughout the play that they could have ended up in the house by chance. Bo, the middle sibling, wants
to throw them away until he discovers that there is a lucrative market for this highly specialized
collectors item (75). When River and Cassidy (Bos fourteen-year-old daughter) are caught looking at
the album, River distances herself from the images by treating them as an educational tool: Cassidy was
actually very mature about them. She was asking all the right questions. She was using the internet (53).
Yet the lynching photographs do not completely upstage the main plot. In keeping the focus on the lives
and emotional struggles of individual characters, whiteness shifts in and out of view, clearly visible when
the photographs demand attention and fading away when the family fights take over. Jacobs-Jenkins
subtly stages opportunities for these opposing registers of whitenessvisible and invisibleto bleed into
one another, rather than building up to one grand gesture in which whiteness is fully exposed and
demystified. In this way, Appropriate is a sophisticated and carefully crafted meditation on how
whiteness functions differently from other races. Steve Garner writes: whiteness is a position from
which other identities are constructed as deviant. The invisibility of whiteness therefore stems from never
having to define itself explicitly. It is seen as the human and universal position requiring no
qualification.[16] Thus whiteness is rendered invisible when Toni suffers over her divorce and sense of
failure as a mother, or when Franz seeks redemption for the pain and trouble he has caused his family
because the conventions of realist drama ensure that they are human first and foremost in these moments.
In adhering to realism, Jacobs-Jenkins demands that the audience acknowledge and grapple with the
privilege of invisibility granted to whiteness while not losing sight of race in the background.
Realisms reliance on material objects to verify the truthfulness of the representation here becomes the
playwrights principal means of keeping invisibility in check. The house itself serves this purpose well;
in the end, the siblings are trying to claim a fortune accumulated through the exploitation of AfricanAmericans. But hidden throughout the detritus cluttering the set are more explicit reminders of racist
violence that intrude on the characters whenever they are about to forget the houses racial history. For
example, the important photograph album (which will resurface constantly throughout the play) makes its
first appearance right after Toni and Bos squabble about who is more responsible for the estates ruin.

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Bo complains that the two graveyards within the propertyone for the familys ancestors, another for the
slavesmake it difficult to sell the house with all the red tape and historical ordinance crap(21). As if
the house is somehow responding to this dismissal of history, Bos wife Rachel discovers exactly at that
moment that her eight-year-old son Ainsley had been flipping through the lynching photographs, abruptly
ending both the argument and the scene. Later, Toni and Franz argue over inheritance rights and Franzs
past sex offenses when other family members enter carrying jars of desiccated body parts: souvenirs
taken from lynchings. And in the emotional climax of the play when the pent-up anger and frustration
explodes into a physical brawl involving all of the adult characters, Ainsley enters wearing a Ku Klux
Klan hood he found in his grandfathers closet. Again, this image immediately ends the fight and the
scene. These shocking mementos of racism not only disrupt the dramatic structure, preventing arguments
and fights from carrying on, they also mediate the audiences perception of race in the play, turning these
people into white people in the blink of an eye.
The mounting evidence of their fathers racism pressures the characters themselves to navigate this
difference; the siblings want to claim what is left of Rays material legacy but at the same time disown
the racial legacy inscribed in his possessions. In this way, Appropriate specifically addresses the most
current iteration of whiteness as ideology: the myth of the post-racial. Post-racial politics reinscribes the
dominance of whiteness by claiming that American society has moved beyond race after the success of
the Civil Rights movement (amplified by the election of President Obama). According to social critic Tim
Wise, this myth insists that economic forces, and even ingrained cultural factors within the African
American community have overtaken the role of racism in explaining the conditions of life faced by black
and brown folks, especially the urban poor, denying the impact of intergenerational disadvantages
caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws, as well as institutionalized racism today in the guise of colorblind
public policy.[17] Not only does the notion of a post-racial society perpetuate norms and value systems
that have historically privileged whites, it erects an impermeable border between whiteness before and
after the eruption of race politics in the mid-twentieth century. When River accuses the entire family of
racism, stressing the evil and cruelty youre descended from thats in your blood, (84) Bo goes on a
defensive rant that reflects this post-racial attitude:
Nobody asked to be born, okay? And certainly nobody asked to be born into this this shitty history, so
tell me what you want me to do. You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great grandparents?
Or should I lynch myself? [] I didnt enslave anybody! I didnt lynch anybody! (84)
Bos frustration and overreaction is in some ways understandable. Significantly, there is nothing in the
play that suggests that he has done anything that would make him a racist in the way that his father was.
But at the same time, even Bos appeal to his individuality is conditioned by whiteness; I didnt enslave
anybody! (84) can only be a meaningful statement of ones morality to a white person.
Meanwhile, the curse metaphor that River evokes is in response to Franzs long speech about how he
threw the photograph album in a lake. He describes this spontaneous act as a healing ritual for himself,
which River then extends to the familys cursed history of racist violence. But Franz struggles to find the
right words to explain how he came to the decision to destroy the photographs:
These things arecrazy. They are so powerful Theyre making everyone act crazy. [] They have
likean energy and, like, where did they come from? Because I never once saw them here. I never once
saw Daddy with them. Its like they came from nowhere. And I was like maybe they emerged for a

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reason, you know? And I was thinking about what Rachel was saying like these were killings like
crimes I was like, maybe were actually supposed to solve this crime maybe something is asking us to
to right what was wrong. (82)
The imaginary scene of the crime and especially the bizarre fantasy that the photographs themselves want
Franz to right what was wrong (84) turns a specific history of racist violence into an archetypal
scenario. In this fantasy, the photographs depict a crime without perpetrators or victims, without origin or
material substance. Thus Franz also attempts to disown the racist legacy within whiteness; his act of
rendering the photographs illegible then amounts to destroying evidence. But whats more revealing is
how he describes his epiphany by the lake:
There was a whole purpose to this journey! I didnt just come here to heal This wasnt about me this
was about all of us. I came here to heal all of us thats what this was all about and this feeling just
took me to the edge of the water and the water seemed to be telling me, Come on in. Come on in and
cleanse yourself. Wash it all away. Take it all in with you and leave it here. So I did. I took everything
all my pain, all Daddys pain, all this familys pain, the pictures and I left it. I washed it all away. (83)
Franzs self-healing is also healing all of us; individuality and universality merge into one. But in his
journey of discovery, Franz traverses through the remainsthe unmarked graves and the photographsof
those who cannot be sublimated into this ideal conjoining of self and world. The play reminds its
audience of those that are not included in the healing ritual, that are not represented, qualifying and
limiting Franzs scope. Then again, Franzs speech feels comically delusional even without reading the
myth of whiteness into it. But that does not negate the validity of Franzs assumedly life-changing
experience; in fact, his speech comes across as ironic precisely because we believe that he believes what
he says. And that principle aptly sums up how Jacobs-Jenkins uses realist characterization to great effect
in this play. The family conflict is never trivialized at the expense of race politics, and even the Lafayette
siblings desire to disassociate themselves from their ancestors racist legacy is a real and plausible
desire, just one that does not speak to all of human experience. In the end, although all of the characters in
Appropriate are white, the representation of whiteness does not envelop the entire drama. It is too limited
and qualified to stake a claim in universality.
If the title of Jacobs-Jenkinss play ironically refers to notions of decorum in what we choose to
represent, Lees title, Straight White Men, is as inappropriate a title as there can be for a realist play,
wearing its ideas and politics on its sleeve rather than dissolving it in a truthful account of reality.
Likewise, Lees reasoning for why she decided to write in traditional realism for the first time is highly
self-conscious: Straight White Men was an attempt to write an identity politics play, a straight white
male identity politics play. And I wanted to use what I saw as the straight white man of theatrical genres,
which is the straight play.[18] Taken at face value, this statement sets up expectations that the play may
be a satire of whiteness, expectations that are supported by Lees caricatures of white people in earlier
plays. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, which is based on the 1932 film The Mask of Fu
Manchu, Terrence and Shelia, the white protagonists of the film, explore their inner moral qualms in the
final scene of the play after killing the Oriental horde gathered to overthrow the Western world. Denying
vehemently that any of her actions are racially motivated, Shelia shouts: Im going to show everyone
that I can make it, that I can succeed without these complaints of racism bringing me down, making me
feel bad about myself! I want everything to be fair and nondiscriminatory and based on logic, and fuck
you! Everything I think is based on logic![19] Shelia shares the same post-racial perspective detectable

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in Bos self-defensive speech, but the joke here is that the racial Other has just been eradicated. (She does
say she feels bad for killing all of those Chinese people in the final line of the play). [20] In Songs of
the Dragons Flying to Heaven, a play that also employs the technique of pitting lurid Asian stereotypes
against normal white people, the white characters are utterly oblivious towards the Asians, refusing to
acknowledge or even share the stage with them. While the Koreans and Korean-American grotesquely
illustrate various stereotypes of Asian women and fight among themselves about identity politics, the
white characters prefer to limit their conversations to their love relationship, their anxiety over potential
alcoholism and other psychological problems, their desire to see Africa, and their dreamsall topics that
mark them as individuals rather than members of a social group. Whiteness is finally recognized and
problematized in one scene, but only for the duration of three lines:
WHITE PERSON 2: You know whats awesome?
WHITE PERSON 1: What.
WHITE PERSON 2: Being white.
WHITE PERSON 1: Being white?
WHITE PERSON 2: Yes, its awesome. Isnt it?
WHITE PERSON 1: I guess I never thought of it. And when I do think of it I feel like an asshole.
WHITE PERSON 2: You shouldnt feel like an asshole. Being white is great.
WHITE PERSON 1: I guess so.[21]
In both of her earlier plays, Lee stereotypes whiteness just as much as Asian-ness, presenting her white
characters as shallow, self-centered, and clueless of the racialized world around them. If the Asian
stereotypes strategically go too far, the white caricatures are inversely devoid of dramatic content,
unwilling to follow through conflict and stuck repeating meaningless, vapid dialogue. Yet this
emptiness as dramatic characters is what shields them from racial politics; as Dyer reflects on
whiteness from his own position as a white scholar, [h]aving no content, we cant see that we have
anything that accounts for our position of privilege and power. This is itself crucial to the security with
which we occupy that position.[22] Lees white caricatures demonstrate the sense of security that having
no content provides, while also attempting to penetrate that barrier and encourage audiences to consider
the connotations of whiteness in relation to the non-white stereotypes.
Lee rethinks her strategies for representing whiteness in Straight White Men. When I asked the playwright
about the all-white cast, she remarked: if youre going to have a play thats called Straight White
Men and theres a minority or a woman in it, its like you know what that confrontation is going to be.
[] Theres nothing that those two people could say to each other that would make me
uncomfortable.[23] Satire and caricature can easily become simplistic answers to a challenging political
issue, and so in the spirit of continuing to challenge her audiences, Lee imbues the white characters in her
latest play with a consciousness of identity politics that most satires of whiteness lack. Indeed, the white
people in this play are able to speak eloquently not only about minority politics in general, but themselves
in terms of race: for example, No, our success is the problem, not the solution![24] or, You cant
change the system without giving up the benefits you gain from that system (70). Unlike the racially
aversive Lafayette siblings, the three brothers in Straight White Men, also middle-aged, do not seem at
first to rely on mythic notions of universality and humanity to mask their whiteness.
Yet when faced with an unresolvable dilemma at the core of whiteness, even their eagerness to talk about
the problem (how conventionally realist of them!) rings unsettlingly hollow. Matt, the eldest of the three

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sons, has moved in with his father Ed after first dropping out of graduate school, and then law school. The
play takes place during the Christmas holidays when Eds other two sons, Jake and Drew visit to relax
and spend time with the family; during this break from work and social life, the four men play games,
joke around, sing, dance, decorate the Christmas tree, dress up as Santa Claus, and consume an exorbitant
amount of food. Everything is swell. But then Matt suddenly breaks down crying in the middle of a
Chinese take-out dinner, which prompts Jake and Drew to delve into Matts condition, questioning his
puzzling lack of ambition and his self-professed contentment working as a temporary administrative
assistant at a human rights organization. Drew believes depression is the cause, while Jake makes a more
troubling diagnosis: a debilitating feeling of guilt over white male privilege. Although the play never
sheds light on the truth of Matts problem, the bits of information that Lee provides on how these white
men were raised gives weight to Jakes explanation. In an early scene, Jake and Drew dig up a board
game that they played as boys, a modified version of Monopoly retitled Privilege. A relic of latetwentieth century identity politics, the game features a pile of excuse cards that serve as lessons of
tolerance and social justice. Some of them read: What I said wasnt sexist/racist/homophobic because I
was joking. and, rather on the nose, I dont have white privilege because it doesnt exist (63). Matt
was the most dedicated of the three to radical identity politics, even establishing Matts School for
Young Revolutionaries (66). The brothers look back to their home education with fond memories, but it
is clear that these men are not revolutionaries, and that they benefit from a social structure that privileges
whites. (Jake is a banker, and Drew is a professor and award-winning novelist.) Thus, even though these
characters constantly mark themselves as white, disavowing myths of individual effort and transracial
universality, it is uncertain whether making whiteness visible is enough to mitigate white privilege.
Admittedly, Straight White Men asks the audience to think through a rather forced scenario: not all
straight white men are as self-aware and knowledgeable as these characters. But Lees work raises
pertinent questions regarding the profusion of identity politics in public discourse and the media, which
may polarize audiences (potentially engendering post-racial backlash) or prevent deeper engagement with
the politics of whiteness by providing easy textbook answers. Indeed, when Jake starts talking about
Matts breakdown in terms of white privilege, Drew interjects: you sound like an undergrad. Everyone
already knows this stuff. Its just masturbation (70). In light of Lees ongoing dedication to creating
theatre that makes herself and her audiences uncomfortable, Straight White Men demonstrates that the
political vocabulary of the past is insufficient in tackling whiteness today. Hence realism. In his review
for the New York Times, Charles Isherwood writes, Believe it or not, Ms. Lee wants us to sympathize
with the inexpressible anguish of her protagonist, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class straight white man
named Matt who has failed to follow the codes of achievement that hes expected to conform to.[25] The
prevailing cultural assumptions regarding whiteness make this request for sympathy difficult to believe,
yet that is precisely what the conventions of realist drama solicits by focusing so heavily on one
characters interior struggle. Realism does not ensure that the audience will like Matt, but it does align
them with the other characters as they try to pin down his predicament, to seek closure to Matts
emotional arc.
Before the play ends, however, Jake and Drew grow irritated by Matts inability to provide closure, and
at the same time provide disclosure (as Barthes discusses regarding conventional realist narrative), to
make himself fully known. When Matt refuses to give a straight answer about anything, Jake explodes
with anger at the idea that his brother is a loser for no reason: in other words, an asocial individual
rather than a representative of whiteness (74). Drew, who had believed until now that Matts breakdown
was caused by a sense of failure and disappointment with his life, remarks coldly: Nobody cares about

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your egotistic white male despair! (75). Unable to sympathize with this defective dramatic character,
the other three white men simply give up and exit the stage, leaving Matt alone, staring out at the
audience (75). Although Matts unfathomable burden stems from whiteness, the final image of the play
suggests that his is somehow different from the whiteness of the other characters. Throughout the play,
Matt is treated as a special case, a freak in Jakes words:
JAKE: [] theres nothing people like us can do in the world that isnt problematic or evil, so we have to
make ourselves invisible!
ED: People like us? Whats that supposed to mean?
JAKE: You know, privileged white dickheads. Women and minorities may get to pretend theyre doing
enough to make the world a better place just by getting ahead, but a white guys pretty hard-pressed to
explain why the world needs him to succeed. So Matts trying to stay out of the way.
ED: Jake, you keep saying this, and I find it very hard to believe.
JAKE: Thats because nobody else would ever do it! Matts a freak.(74)
Significantly, Jakes thorough analysis of whiteness only entails intervention in Matts special case; the
social privileges enjoyed by the other white characters, while acknowledged, are regarded as an inevitable
and unchangeable effect of the systemjust the way things are in the world. By being ostensibly marked
as white, Matt is paradoxically excluded from white people like us (74). But because he is only a halffinished character, lacking closure in the traditional sense, the whiteness that marks him remains
unfamiliar, indeterminate, and not reified. Matts unarticulated dilemma suggests a potential fracturing of
whiteness beyond its conventional image as an ideological monolith; to conceive of the possibility of
sympathizing with Matt is to explore its rough and uneven surfaces, even if that means entering
uncomfortable terrain.
To conclude, I would like to return to Lees tongue-in-cheek observation that realism is the straight white
man of theatrical genres. The American tradition of realist family drama has been closely associated with
the monopoly of whiteness in theatrical representation; Jacobs-Jenkinss response to hearing people
describe the great American family drama is There are no people of color on these lists. Who has
access to this idea of family as a universal theme?[26] But realism resembles straight white men in
another sense as well. In drama and theatre scholarship, realism is often treated paradoxically as a bully
and a loser at the same time, both overbearing as a vessel of dominant ideology and underachieving as an
aesthetic formnot unlike how straight white men are distorted into easy, abstract targets of criticism. The
critical lens crafted by Diamond and other theorists allows us to see through realisms smooth surface
and scrutinize its ideological foundations, but as a damaging side effect, this lens has also blinded us to
the forms untapped potential by presupposing that realism always operates in the same manner.
Appropriate and Straight White Men demonstrate that realism can still be a refreshing and viable form to
explore the politics of representation, and especially the politics of representing whiteness, which has
relied on realist techniques throughout modern history. The first step towards utilizing the potential for
realism to offer such new insight is to move away from the Barthesian framework of myth that has
dominated discussions on realism in the past few decades. As a form that enables myth, realism was
thought in the past to insist on a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a
world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity.[27] But Jacobs-Jenkins
and Lees dramatic worlds are full of contradictions and hidden layers, despite being inhabited only by
white characters. In place of blissful clarity, Appropriate and Straight White Men leave the audience
with the feeling that they have not seen everything, that realisms representative scope does not extend

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beyond the walls of the living room onstage.

Kee-Yoon Nahm is a Doctorate in Fine Arts candidate in the Department of Dramaturgy and Dramatic
Criticism, Yale School of Drama. His current research examines strategies of appropriating cultural
stereotypes in American drama and theatre from 1960 to today, in relation to contemporaneous political
discourse on representation, subversion, and spectatorship. His writings have appeared in Theater,
Theatre Journal, and the anthology Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. He also works as a
translator and dramaturg.

[1] Appropriate ran at the Signature Center from February to April 2014, following productions in
Louisville, Chicago, and Washington D.C. Straight White Men opened at the Public Theater in November
2014 following its world premiere at the Wexner Center for Arts in Columbus, Ohio and a brief
international tour.
[2] Richard Dyer, White (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 45.
[3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins & Eliza Bent, Feel that Thought: Branden Jacobs-Jenkinss Plays Are HighWire Performances in Themselves, Part 1, American Theatre (May/June 2014),
http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=7&indexID=44, accessed 28 May2014.
[4] I will provide a more detailed account of this trajectory in Lees work later in the discussion.
[5] Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 4-5.
[6] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 142.
[7] Varun Begley, Objects of Realism: Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, and Marsha Norman, Theatre
Journal 64, no. 3 (October 2012): 339.
[8] For a more recent reappraisal of dramatic realism than the examples I discuss, see also Jill Dolan,
Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein, Theatre Journal, 60,
no. 3 (October 2008): 433-457.
[9] Jeanie Forte, Realism,Narrative, and the Feminist Playwright A Problem of Reception Modern
Drama 32, no.1 (March 1989): 117.
[10] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997) 56.

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[11] Ibid., 59.

[12] Dyer, 11.
[13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate, unpublished manuscript, (2014), 46. Used by permission. All
subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis.
[14] Ben Brantley, A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark, New York Times, 16 March 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-jenkins-subvertstradition.html, accessed 29 November 2014.
[15] Hilton Als, GWTW in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM:
Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) 42.
[16] Steve Garner, Whiteness: An Introduction (London & New York: Routledge, 2007) 39.
[17] Tim Wise, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 6364.
[18] Young Jean Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014.
[19] Young Jean Lee, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 2009) 173.
[20] Ibid., 174.
[21] Ibid., 71.
[22] Dyer, 9.
[23] Lee, interview by the author, 8 February 2014.
[24] Young Jean Lee, Straight White Men, in American Theatre, unpublished manuscript, April 2015, 70.
Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis.
[25] Charles Isherwood, My Three Sons and All Their Troubles, The New York Times. November 18,
2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/theater/straight-white-men-opens-at-the-publictheater.html?_r=1, accessed 29 November 2014.
[26] Jacobs-Jenkins & Bent, Feel that Thought.
[27] Barthes, 143.

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"Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men"
by Kee-Yoon Nahm
ISNN 2376-4236
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 2015)
2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Editorial Board:
Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson
Advisory Editor: David Savran
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editorial Staff:
Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey
Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona
Advisory Board:
Bill Demastes
Amy E. Hughes
Jorge Huerta
Esther Kim Lee
Kim Marra
Beth Osborne
Robert Vorlicky
Maurya Wickstrom
Stacy Wolf
Esther Kim Lee

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Table of Contents
"The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by
Brian Eugenio Herrera
"Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm
"Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter"
by Bradley Stephenson
"Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its
Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks

www.jadtjournal.org
jadt@gc.cuny.edu
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center:
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director
2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10016

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