“Get out of the car.” “Shut the fuck up before we beat your ass.” So begins the searing storytelling in 12 Angry Men… and Women: The Weight of the Wait. Based on a book which explored the black male experience in dealing with police brutality, The Billie Holiday Theatre updated a previously performed play to also includes female voices. Obviously the material is timely. Predictably it is upsetting. The production is gripping and relentless, like the racism on display.
A preview of the creation and celebration of the first Black Lives Matter Plaza in New York City begins this streamed theatrical event. The play was performed live last Saturday night on the mural in the middle of the street. The theater and this show are located in the middle of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. A fitting locale as this area has been a center of African-American culture for the last century.
In this new century, more stories need to be told. Director Dr. Indira Etwaroo makes the mission clear in her letter to the audience. “We must pass a better world on to the next generation. The time has come to stand together. The time for justice is now.”
Musicians from the New York Philharmonic begin the show with a musical overture. The sirens begin and lights are flashing. A view into the terrors and humiliations which follow are clear-eyed, angry and emotional.
Five actors perform their monologues (with some intersecting dialogue) in separate acting modules. The production design and especially the lighting effects ratchet up feelings of claustrophobia and intentional targeting. Staged in the middle of the street at night lends an additional air of tension, especially in concert with the stories’ settings. The visible yellow Black Lives Matter painted on the road firmly grounds the work in the now. The urgency demanded by a serious docudrama is on full display.
The first vignette told is one of a criminal justice reporter for the New York Times. He traveled to Salisbury, Maryland for a story. His head was shoved down on a police vehicle. Of course this was a case of mistaken accusation but no apology was offered. “Sir, this is the south. We have different laws down here.” The unspoken word that entered my mind was “still.”
These stories are by no means focused geographically. An English woman and her brother were driving near Los Angeles when they were pulled over. She had not lived in America long enough to understand how the police functioned here. Her experience put her “squarely in a sub-region of the borders of American blackness.”
A Harvard lawyer is harassed while making a phone call in Boston’s airport. A teen describes everyday with the DT’s, or local detectives, in her neighborhood. More car pullovers. Scenes of abject terror and fear. Tough choices between one’s rights and dignity, or death. The material is as hard as is the subject matter. It is supposed to be. And it succeeds.
A story of a black man going to a bar during a return home to Asheville, North Carolina overwhelmed me with its cruelty. Another horrifying tale when an illegal left turn resulted in 45 stitches in the head. How about a Professor of Criminal Procedures walking home at night in his neighborhood? Don’t think you can face this material? You must, especially if this is not the America you see each and every day. Let artists help us all understand and reflect and share.
How else are we going to heal from the all-too recent scars of the Breonna Taylor tragedy? 12 Angry Men… and Women ends with Ms. Taylor’s mother’s words. You will hear how she learned what happened to her daughter. It is sickening and heartbreaking. This is vital theater and needs to be experienced for both its power and its purpose. And, most importantly, to help us push forward to a more just society tomorrow.
“We must pass a better world on to the next generation. The time has come to stand together. The time for justice is now.”
12 Angry Men… and Women: The Wait of the Weight is streaming on You Tube on the page of The Billie Holiday Theatre.