52 pages • 1 hour read
Jackie Sibblies DruryFairview
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Food
Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions and discussions of racism, race, and Black racial stereotypes.
Onstage, the Frasier family’s action is centered on food and the significance of the family meal. As Beverly tells Dayton, “Family is everything” (10), implying that at the dinner table, the family members must set their differences aside. However, the chaos of the preparations demonstrates that intentions do not always become reality. From the start of Act I, Beverly is stressed by her own determination that the meal must be perfect, and her act of peeling real carrots becomes an important distinction as the play progresses. These carrots take an inordinate amount of time to peel and act as a form of performative busy work to represent the act of cooking. They also stand as a pointedly authentic version of food that contrasts sharply with the increasingly fake and flamboyant stage props that crowd the dinner table in Act II, when the four voices impose their racist misconceptions on the narrative.
Throughout the play, food and drink also represent the family’s social and financial status, and their consumption of wine and bottled beer suggests that the Frasiers are more bourgeois than working-class. For example, Jasmine boasts that the rosé she brought is from France. By contrast, when Jimbo/Tyrone demands a 40-ounce can of malt liquor rather than the wine or beer on offer, he is infiltrating the Frasiers’ lives and social status by forcing a racial stereotype that does not fit their nice house and upper-middle-class existence. However, once he demands the malt liquor, it immediately materializes, implying that the impositions of racism have an insidious way of reshaping reality.
The motif of food continues when Bets defines race by saying, “The food is different, the culture is different, the look of the people is different” (48), thereby asserting that food is a major marker of racial difference. This misconception is further emphasized when Suze sees herself as having some authenticity in the role of a Black woman simply because she grew up eating cornbread and collard greens. Beverly’s meal of short ribs is more gourmet than culturally meaningful, but her insistence upon root vegetables connotes familial and racial roots, which separate the four white characters from authentic Black identity. Many of the soul food dishes that are tied into the history of Black American heritage were invented by enslaved people who were making the best of the limited and inferior food available.
In the play, the line between authenticity and performance is especially significant in relation to the food. The carrots are real food that provides real sustenance, while a plate of brie that no one can touch hovers on the boundary between real and fake, and a birthday cake that isn’t homemade is wholly inauthentic. By the end of Act II, the Frasiers—influenced by the four speakers’ prejudices—are loading the table with fake food. When the white characters start a food fight in Act III, destroying dinner and the Frasiers’ home through senseless aggression, “something is actually broken” (99), and the ruined meal becomes a deeper betrayal of Beverly’s act of love and respect than they can ever understand, for the four interlopers have destroyed the racial and cultural significance of the Frasiers’ family meal.
Dancing
At the beginning of Act I, Beverly listens to music and dances as she peels carrots. Just as the carrots are real, Beverly’s dancing is presented as an authentic moment of self-expression. When the speaker glitches, it makes her uneasy, as if the glitch represents a crack in her reality. Throughout the first act, the characters onstage dance, perhaps, a bit too frequently. Their dances seem normal at first, but when Keisha rhythmically “smells her armpits and rubs her tummy,” calling it her “I’m clean and I’m starving dance” (25), the dancing takes a turn toward the nonsensical. Later, Act II clarifies the reason why the family does so much dancing, for although the white characters pay little attention to the action onstage, they nonetheless turn and watch approvingly when the characters perform a rendition of Mama’s birthday dance. Bets, Mack, and Jimbo cheer happily, pleased that the Black characters are showing what they see as being a universal Black talent and propensity for dancing and singing. Jimbo uses this stereotype to dismiss any possibility that Suze could survive as a Black woman, deeming Suze to be too uptight and rigid to dance. Because the play explores the idea of Black art that is created for the consumption of white audiences, the seemingly endless dancing panders to racist stereotypes and expectations of Blackness that have been constructed by white people with limited firsthand knowledge of Black people—just as minstrel shows did in the 19th century, falsely purporting to depict authentic sense of Blackness onstage. In fact, in Act II, Jimbo references the “cakewalk,” a minstrel show dance in which white performers dressed as Black people in order to parody rich white people. Drury inserts this oblique reference as a fitting metaphor for the play’s treatment of race.
Bets, Mack, and Jimbo use positive stereotypes and the guise of admiration of Black people as a way to preserve their beliefs in racist generalizations without acknowledging that such beliefs are still racist. Thus, Drury emphasizes that even positive stereotypes are harmful, for in some cases, they place unreasonable expectations that a given individual may not be able to meet. In other situations, such stereotypes detract from a person’s hard work to develop their talent, dismissing hard-won skills as being natural and effortless. These stereotypes also create pigeonholes for entire races, many of which are less flattering than the play’s white characters would admit. In the play, Jimbo’s insult that Suze is always stuck in her head, which would make her a terrible Black person, is also an implicit insult toward Black people, whom Jimbo insinuates must have a lower degree of intellect or thoughtfulness than white people. The white characters enjoy watching the Frasiers dance, so the characters dance more and more to satiate their desires. Because the four spectators know little about Black culture and history, the characters pile dances upon dances merely for the benefit of the white gaze. As the play closes in on the end of Act II, the white characters do not care that the excessive dancing has become nothing but vapid movement, empty of meaning. In Act III, Bets, Mack, and Jimbo are all excited to dance themselves now that they are supposedly Black. Notably, in Act I, before the world of the play starts to crumble, Keisha has an authentically joyful moment while watching her mother and aunt dance, excited about her future and loving the women she came from.
The Fourth Wall
The convention of the fourth wall in theater was first identified in the mid-18th century and rose in popularity in the late 19th century with the development of realism and naturalism. The notion was originally based on the structure of a proscenium theater, in which audiences view plays on a stage that is situated behind a proscenium arch. This arch functions like a picture frame that stands between the action onstage and the seating of the theater. At the same time, trends in scenic design shifted toward the box set, much like the realistic living room in Fairview. These box sets mimic real-world buildings and rooms that are enclosed by four walls, and by convention, the downstage wall closest to the audience is imaginary. Actors treat the fourth wall as if it is solid and visible to them, which means that the audience does not exist within the world of the play. With the fourth wall intact, audiences take on a voyeuristic role, sitting in the dark and spying on the imaginary lives of the characters. In Fairview, the fourth wall is intact at first, preparing audiences to watch a traditional, conventional play.
Typically, the fourth wall is only a metaphor for one possible relationship between the audience and the performance. In Fairview, however, the ethics of this surveillance and consumption are called into question as the play draws attention to the unequal dynamic between Black lives—even fictional ones—and the all-encompassing oppression of the white gaze. The play therefore suggests that the relationship between white spectators and Black characters is more than a simple symbiotic exchange. Since most theater audiences are predominantly white, even Black playwrights creating work that features Black actors and Black-centered narratives must acknowledge—and sometimes pander to—the white audiences that will likely be the end consumers. The flip side of this reality is that BIPOC playwrights can also choose to address white audiences and make themselves heard to those with societal power. This is the tactic that Drury chooses with Fairview, for she wrote the play with the foreknowledge of the likely demographic of the majority of the audience, and she employs the fourth wall to create this powerful yet implicit conversation.
Drury therefore constructs the fourth wall, letting audiences depend on its seeming solidity, and then shifts it, making it permeable before ultimately reducing it to metaphorical rubble. The imposition of the white gaze is not only apparent in the cultural production of Black art, but it also extends to the cultural production of Blackness and Black identity. In Fairview, for instance, there is a mirror on the fourth wall, which the playwright reassures in the stage directions is “a very normal thing to have happen in a play” (8). Beverly is the first to use it, checking her makeup and whether she is presentable by looking at her imaginary reflection, which amounts to looking for her reflection in the audience. Later, Jasmine does the same at least twice, and Keisha utilizes the imaginary mirror as well. However, although they are miming to create the illusion of the mirror and the fourth wall, it is significant that they cannot view their own reflection with their own eyes. They can only adjust themselves by looking for their reflection in the eyes of the audience.
In the second act, the fourth wall moves backward just enough to place the four white spectators under the unwitting gaze of the audience, but this time, they become the reflection of the audience, as the audience is now invading the private sphere of white people talking about race in a way they would only speak in front of other white people. In the third act, the white spectators join the Frasiers onstage and impose stereotypes of Black hardships and misery, but they’re doing it on an interpersonal level rather than from the distance of audience response. They perform the way that the white gaze reshapes and produces Black identity, a metaphor for the millions of ways in which white people hold power in society yet fail to use it to combat the effects of racism. Keisha, who fully breaks the fourth wall at the end, calls for a “fair view” (105), in which no one is on display.
