The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2021, pt. 14: Andrea Hairston

 

2021 Pleasures
by Andrea Hairston

How can we be different together?

That’s a question I use for my speculative theatre and film class. It’s a question that animates much science fiction and fantasy and is at the heart of why we social beings do theatre. Play allows us to understand who and what we are and also who and what we are not. Play allows us to shape shift, time travel, and conjure other realities. Theatre is organized play, a rehearsal of the possible and the impossible that turns random folks into community. To act, you embody what you are not, becoming the other. I read in the Smithsonian Magazine about folks training for life on Mars in an Earth setting built to duplicate the challenges people might experience when they land on that planet and have to create a reality to support and sustain themselves. The people doing this experiment proclaimed, insisted: This is not PERFORMANCE ART, but SCIENCE. Well, actually it is performance art as science.

Theatre (the arts in general) are suspect—subjective, emotional, intuitive, and, well, fun. It’s fun to leave your mundane, everyday body and, with the aid of props, costumes, special effects, and other performers, become—the astronaut who travels millions of miles cooped up with other irritable primates to a desert planet where you must survive a hostile environment and each other. Good to rehearse that before you go to Mars.

Science is suspect these days too. Since theories aren’t the absolute, unchanging word of an all-knowing, unbiased supreme being, how can we trust science? Tomorrow they’ll discover something new, and I’ll have to rip up everything I thought! And who’s writing the check?

You can’t trust science, and you can’t trust the arts, what’s a rational being to do? One of the central metaphors/analogies of the current digital age is that minds are computers. Supposedly, a good mind, a brilliant mind is a brilliant computer. Genius is singular and allows for innovation, transformation, and progress. Emotions taint our rational processes, so unbiased algorithms are the purest and best form of mind.

Actually. mind is a community. Social interaction and collaboration across time and space is genius. And for that, empathy (and all the emotions) are essential. To be innovative and brilliant, to survive and thrive in this challenging planetary/cosmic environment, we need each other. That’s the story all the novels, non-fiction books, plays, films and TV shows I’ve enjoyed this year have been telling. 

Like Pixar’s Soul, an animated delight about the sacrifices we make and the spirits we share as we improvise our way from the Great Before to the Great Beyond. Or For the Good of the Realm by Nancy Jane Moore which is, as its title suggests, a rip roaring adventure about how we make each other possible. Anna d’Gart, the swashbuckling lead, collaborates with a surprising crew to save the people of her world from their worst selves. And she does it all for love.

My beginning Playwriting class, possibly the last playwriting class I’ll teach at Smith College, was an inspiration. One student wrote that at first she was put off by her classmates writing plays that didn’t seem important to her. By the end of the class, she realized that the different stories people told and the perspectives they took were a portal to wonderful, useful possibilities for her writing and also her living in the world. And on her own, she never would have come up with her good ideas. Smarter together. Survival of the Friendliest, Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering our Common Humanity by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods insists that social intelligence, the capacity for empathy, the capacity to understand what might be going on in someone else’s mind is the genius of people, dogs, crows, elephants, bees, and other social beings. Exchanging ideas with a diverse group of people/beings, being friendly with those who disagree with us or those who are not like us results in innovation and creativity. When strangers are possible friends with much to contribute to the realm (as opposed to dangerous enemies), we can find the best of who we are.

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler (coming out in March 2022) is an exploration of the tragic conflicts and melodramatic violence at the core of the American story. Karen investigates our mythic history, touching on monumental events from 1820-1865 but focusing on what hasn’t been told. The (ongoing) American civil war is played out in one family, a theatrical family, a family of drunkards, performers, impresarios, writers, and assassins. They are free people who live intimately with enslaved people, yet take their freedom for granted. They are men who expect glorious lives and women who don’t know what to want. Given the multiple points of view, readers shape shift and time travel. The (ongoing) American civil war is high drama and it’s not over yet. The echoes from this very different past time in our own time are chilling and revelatory.

In Face (coming out in August 2022), Joma West conjures a world where the wealthy elite spend most of their time transforming their lives into digital performance art. Dominance is virtual, touch is taboo, and happiness and friendship are illusions. Wicked, witty, and wise, Face unmasks the nightmare at the heart of our dream widgets and illuminates the loneliness of social media platforms that obliterate vulnerability and make actual connection impossible.

Monkey Around by Jadie Jang is shapeshifting action adventure in San Francisco now or in a blink. The book features a crowd of quick-change creatures who have to figure out who they are while agitating for justice, battling soul suckers, falling in love, and investigating a bunch of murders. If you can transform into anyone or anything, who exactly are you and how do you fit in with everyone else??? Identity is a verb, not a noun.

We vulnerable mortals are cooped up with other irritable primates on a tricky planet where we frequently must survive a dangerous environment and each other. How do we find out who we want to be when we’re all too often at each other’s throats and calling for blood? Léopold Sédar Senghor said, “I feel the other, I dance the other, therefore I am.”

Andrea Hairston is a novelist, playwright, and scholar. Aqueduct Press published her first three novels, all of which are now forthcoming from Tor: Will Do Magic For Small Change, a New York Times Editor’s pick and finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Otherwise Awards; Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Otherwise and Carl Brandon Awards; Mindscape, winner of the Carl Brandon Award. Aqueduct also published Lonely Stardust, a collection of essays and plays. “Dumb House,” a short story appears in New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. Andrea has received grants from the NEA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her latest novel, Master of Poisons, came out from Tor.com and is on the 2020 Kirkus Review’s Best SF and F list. In her spare time, Andrea is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College and the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre.