Fairview is a 2018 play by Jackie Sibbles Drury.
It starts off as a domestic comedy about an upper-middle-class black family. The mom, Beverly, is making a cake for her mother's birthday party. She sends her husband, Dayton, off to get tableware and vegetables. Beverly's sister Jasmine shows up and gently mocks how Beverly is treating the party as Serious Business. Beverly hopes her brother Tyrone, a lawyer, will be able to make it, but Tyrone's flight in has been rerouted. Finally there's Beverly and Dayton's daughter Keisha, a thoughtful young woman who has just graduated from high school and hopes to convince her mom to let her take a gap year before college.
Then things start to get weird. The second act actually repeats the first act, but with the characters in the shadows and largely muted. Instead, the audience hears the voices of four white people—Jimbo, Suze, Bets, and Mack—who, it turns out, are actually members of the audience watching the play Fairview. It starts with one of the white people asking what race the others would become if they could change their race, and goes downhill from there, as the white audience members make a whole bunch of thoughtlessly racist or overtly racist comments.
In the third act things get really weird. The four white audience members appear onstage as characters in the play, but they know they're in a play. They start acting in an exaggerated, minstrel show stereotypes, rewriting the story as they go along, forcing the black characters on the stage to conform.
Tropes:
- Audience Participation: In her Breaking the Fourth Wall at the end, Keisha asks the white people in the audience to come up on the stage, then addresses a person of color in the audience and says that black people need their own space.
- Author Powers: In the last act the white people enter into the play and start changing the story. Jimbo enters as Tyrone, and plays Tyrone, previously described as an attorney, as a rapping gangsta draped in gold chains. Dayton the responsible husband and father is suddenly said to have gambled away all the family's savings. Then the white people, continuing to improvise, change the story to say that actually Beverly spent all the family's money on drugs and Dayton has syphillis.
- Aside Comment: Keisha does this a couple of times. The stage direction describes it as "a soliloquy...a theatrical device where a character talks aloud and no one onstage can hear them." Keisha's first Aside Comment also contains the biggest foreshadowing in Act One, when she interrupts her excitement over her future to say that she feels some force is controlling her. This is played with towards the end of the play, as Keisha turns to the audience again to again, describe her feeling that something is wrong, only to be shocked when Suze, playing Mama, hears her and responds to her.
- As You Know: Beverly describes Tyrone as "my idiot brother" to Dayton so the audience will know who Tyrone is.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: At the end of the play Keisha breaks the fourth wall—the stage direction actually says "Keisha steps through the fourth wall"—and addresses the white people in the audience, telling them to get up on the stage so the black people in the audience can watch them, rather than the whites always doing the watching.
- Cool Uncle: In the first, comedic part of the play, Jasmine is this. She pokes fun at her sister's Serious Business party preparations, asks nosy questions about Beverly's love life, tries to give Keisha a glass of wine, and agrees to work on Beverly to let Keisha take a gap year.
- Faint in Shock: Hearing that the birthday cake has burned causes Beverly to freak out and faint. This is when the comedy of Act One starts turning to something darker.
- Flat "What": Suze, playing "Mama", reacts this way when Bets enters the play as a second, crudely stereotyped sassy grandma version of "Mama".Suze: What the fuck.
- Food Fight: The white people from the audience who enter the play force the black family to act out an assortment of racist stereotypes: teen pregnancy, venereal disease, drug addiction, slaving away as menial labor. Then they end the party by starting a food fight. The stage direction notes that the white people are the aggressors, and that it's silly at first but "the silly gives way to violence that feels more consequential."
- Foreshadowing: There are a couple of hints in Act One that something is not quite right. There's music playing in the opening scene where Beverly is chopping carrots, but the music goes staticky for a second, only for Beverly to glare offstage before the music kicks back up. There's another hint later when Keisha comments to the audience about how she feels something is controlling her.Keisha: But I feel like something is keeping me from all that.
Something...
Yes, something is keeping me from what I could be.
And that something.
It thinks that it has made me who I am. - Formal Full Array of Cutlery: Beverly, taking the dinner party way too seriously, makes sure that every place setting has "salad fork dinner fork dessert fork steak knife butter knife soup spoon tea spoon".
- Grand Staircase Entrance: After the white people voiceover ends, the story picks back up with the black family at the party. They call for Mama, and "Mama" appears at the top of the stairs, and it's Suze, one of the white people. She has on an elaborate dress and a turban with a rhinestone.Stage Direction: She looks at them. She Descends The Staircase. She has a Moment.
- Medium Awareness: In her Breaking the Fourth Wall address that closes the play, Keisha suddenly realizes that she is in a play. She encourages the white people in the audience to come up on the stage, tells them the play is about to end, and points out a stagehand.
- Nothing Is the Same Anymore: A seemingly rather conventional Dom Com play about a family birthday party goes completely sideways starting with Act Two, when white people in the audience are heard talking about the play while the action from Act One repeats itself.
- N-Word Privileges: After Jim ends the idiot "what race would you be" discussion by saying he'd want to be black, Mack accuses him of wanting to be able to say the N-word.
- The Other Darrin: In-Universe. When the white people insert themselves into the story, Suze becomes Mama Frasier, the grandma who's having a birthday. But Suze, who is only mildly racist, is too restrained, so Bets bursts in playing an exaggerated, "Yas queen" version of Mama. At a couple of points Suze and Bets talk over each other as each tries to play the part.
- Recursive Reality: A play called Fairview, in which members of the audience of Fairview talk about the action and then insert themselves into the third act of the play.
- Serious Business: Beverly is stressing out hard about the party, yelling at Jasmine for eating some of the cheese, freaking out at her husband for not getting the right tableware. This is comedic for most of Act One, as Dayton and Jasmine tease Beverly, but it turns dark right at the end when Beverly faints. This is the turning point of the play where the voices of the white people take over the story.
- Spicy Latina: Two pages after Mack insists that Suze use the jargon word "Latinx" instead of "Latino", he is saying that "Latinx" people have "this pelvic, spicy, bright bold thing...it's like muy caliente in the streets and in the sheets."
- Stop Being Stereotypical: Inverted, as the white people from the audience, after entering the play to perform as "black" characters, insist that the real black characters act more stereotypical. Jimbo, given a beer at the dinner table, says "No no no, this isn't the kind of beer you'd have", and asks for "a forty or a Colt .45."
- Suddenly Shouting: The white people's moronic babbling that is heard in voiceover throughout Act Two ends with Jimbo suddenly screaming, "WILL YOU ALL JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LISTEN TO ME? I'M TRYING TO MAKE A FUCKING POINT. GODDAMN." Then he goes on a bizarre rant that runs for five pages in the script about how he regards his life as a movie about his own story, and he knows he's the villain of the movie, but that's ok, because everyone is still watching. The rant ends with Jimbo again suddenly screaming, "HEY! I'M TALKING TO YOU FUCKERS! DO YOU KNOW WHAT I FUCKING MEAN?!?!?"
