Fairview

The history of the way Blackness has been performed and produced in the United States is, at its center, a history of performing and reifying Otherness. Although the tradition of Black-produced theater reaches back nearly as far as the United States’ origins and should not be discounted, it is important to note that the most widespread and influential early performances of Blackness were performed by white people. In minstrelsy, simplified stereotypes of Blackness reinforced widespread cultural beliefs such as the notions that Black people were not sensitive to pain and did not love their children like white people did. These performances are often thought to be open mockery, but they were even more insidious in that they were billed as authentic depictions of Blackness, and their propagation therefore rationalized the ongoing oppression of Black people and created a foundation of stereotypes that reverberated through centuries of performance. After the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States in 1865, a malicious desire to keep Black people afraid and subservient led to a rise in another type of entertainment: lynching. Hundreds or thousands of white people would gather, often packing a picnic and bringing the kids to watch the spectacle of lynching. With the advancement of camera technology, lynching photography, with prints sold at lynching events as keepsakes and postcards, became its own genre of performance. With the presumed objectivity of photographic evidence, lynching victims were depicted alone and were rendered into grotesque objects. Their grief-stricken families are nowhere in evidence, and this presentation was designed to suggest that the victim was monstrous, unloved, and unmissed. In the early 20th century, beginning in the decade before the Harlem Renaissance, Black women began to counter this narrative by writing lynching plays. These were revolutionary in that they were centered on loving Black families in the domestic sphere, and they pointedly depicted the pain suffered by the loved ones of lynching victims.

As the art of film grew in popularity, “blackface” roles continued, as in the 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. Although the film was known for demonstrating innovative techniques, it also encouraged the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and spread dangerous lies and violent stereotypes. The film, which depicts the KKK as heroes, was the first film shown in the White House. As Black actors began to find work in film, they were often relegated to subservient and rootless roles and were forced to act as accessories to the white families at the center of the plot, as in Gone With the Wind (1939). With the explosion of Black creativity during the Harlem Renaissance and the increasing focus on Black civil rights, depictions in film and theater gradually became more human and less stereotypical. The short-lived Federal Theater Project, a piece of a Depression-era initiative to create jobs in theater and other fields, nurtured and furthered Black performance through the Negro Theater Project. In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the first play on Broadway to be written by a Black woman, made history as a mainstream testament to the strength of Black familial bonds. (Significantly, the Frasier family in Fairview bears a resemblance to the Younger family in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.) On television, shows with individual Black characters in the 1950s and 1960s gave way to 1970s sitcoms that centered on Black families, such as Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. In the 1980s, The Cosby Show became monumental for its portrayal of an upper-middle-class Black family with two highly educated parents, and the show became the most popularly watched series on television for five of its eight seasons. The Cosby Show also set the precedent for shows like Family Matters and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, comedies that represent Black families as normal and nuanced. Such portrayals are also echoed in Drury’s depiction of the Frasiers.