“Can you be Black and not perform?” Eisa Davis asks, then sings “No,” while playing her keyboard.
This is the central question, but not the only answer, in “The Essentialisn’t.” There’s also another question hovering over the show: What is it?
Davis, who collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on “The Warriors” concept album last year, is the writer, director, main composer and principal performer in what I can justify calling performance art, but could just as easily be described as a concert, an art exhibition, a lyrical riff about Black female identity, a memoir in disguise. Just searching for the right genre label, though, misses the point: What are we meant to take from “The Essentialisn’t?
The answer I landed on is: A lot. This is an untidy, wet, entertaining, provocative, mystifying contrivance, composed of parts so widely disparate that they don’t really fit together; the show doesn’t really add up — except somehow it does anyway, because of Davis’ guiding intelligence and talent.
Before the performance even begins, there is a projection of Black dancers and musicians in 1930s movies, interspersed with a video of Davis immersed in a tank of water. Then in a vestibule between the lobby and the theater, there is an exhibit, complete with wall label, that features a pair of tap shoes and a series of books by Black intellectuals (including Davis herself) dangling on a wire over a plexiglass “ballot box” This is where the theatergoers are asked to submit a one-word description of the “essence of Black women.”
When we finally enter the theater, there is Davis in person immersed in a tank of water. She climbs out, and dons a dress made of hair. After posing and answering the central question in song, she and the two other cast members, whom she calls “the Sovereigns,” bring out a neon sign with the same question – “CAN YOU BE BLACK AND NOT PERFORM” Over the course of the next ninety minutes, they put squares of white paper over different parts of the sentence, giving the sign new meaning each time (eg “YOU BE BLACK NOT PERFORM”), until what is left is “Black form.”
It’s not just in the awkward title, but in the body of “The Essentialisn’t,” that Davis lets us know she doesn’t believe in essentialism – which is the view that (as she puts it in word and song) “categories of people, of distinct gender, sexual, and/or racial identities, have intrinsically different and characteristic natures or dispositions.” – that someone “can know you before they even know you.”
At the same time, though, among the points she makes in song, or spoken word, or movement, is a historical one that generalizes about Black people –that slavery took away Black people’s true stories, forcing them to perform a narrative that was not their own. This performance implicitly reflects W.E.B. DuBois’s famous concept of double consciousness, the sense of being two distinct selves, one rooted in their Black heritage and culture and another defined by how white society perceived them.
This enforced performance, Davis implies, created a literal space for Black performers on stage, catering to a white audience, who as a result assumed that all Black people are natural performers.
Davis satirically explores the widespread assumption that all Black women can belt like Aretha; she shows us a video of a variety of Black people singing the first line of the song from Dreamgirls “And I am telling you I’m not going,” then encourages the audience to sing it, then observes about Black women: “Your authenticity has been challenged if you don’t hit that Jennifer Holliday or Jennifer Hudson note just right.” So she then instructs one of the sovereigns, and then all of us, to sing the lyric badly.
With the help of the sovereigns, she dramatizes an experience she tells us she had in acting school, when she was performing as Maggie in a scene from Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in front of two teachers who told her not to perform “Just be. Have a private moment in public.” But then they object that she’s not doing the role as herself – in others, black enough. “Remember. We can’t train you in Blackness. We’re white. You’ll have to do that for yourself.”
“The Warriors” concept album made her more widely known, but Eisa Davis has spent decades as, yes, a performer (on Broadway and Off Broadway, in movies and on TV), and also a songwriter and a playwright; her plays include “Bulrusher” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and “Angela’s Mixtape,” an autobiographical play about growing up in the shadow of her famous aunt, the political activist and academic Angela Davis. Eisa Davis is a deep and serious talent, and, if I couldn’t follow everything in “The Essentialisn’t,” I took the advice of HERE’s artistic directors to surrender to the show’s “rhythms and revelations” – “to let the experience wash over you.” Maybe that explains all the water.
The Essentialisn’t
HERE through September 28
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $30-120
Written, directed and performed by Eisa Davis
Sound designer and live sound mixer Chris Payne, video designer Skye Mahaffie, lighting designer Cha See, soundscape artist and designer Rucyl Mills, movement consultant Okwui Okpokwasili, scenic and costume consultant Peter Born
Cast: Princess Jacob and Jamella Cross as the Sovereigns
Photos by Daniel J. Vasquez
