Jackie & Me (42)

Jackie & Me (playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company's Space Theatre through December 22), is an adaptation of the second novel in author Dan Gutman's series for children in which young Joey Stoshack has the power to visit baseball greats during times past by holding a baseball card. In this installment, Joey goes back in time to Jackie Robinson's rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

According to the production notes, the adaptation of the first novel in the series was produced by a children's theatre company, and this play clearly is intended for a similar audience. As one might expect from the genre, Joey meets a baseball great, learns an important moral lesson, and goes back to his life a person changed for the better. The trope is tired and trite, but relatively harmless when applied to Honus Wagner. In this case, it has the unfortunate effect of turning Jackie Robinson into the magical negro who is significant because of the character development he inspires in the play's white protagonist. Once again, the narrative of persons of color is mediated through a white perspective. (As part of his time-traveling gift, Joey magically becomes African-American. Yes, it was painful and slightly embarrassing to watch a white actor pretend he was black.) Set alongside the premiere of Just Like Us, Jackie & Me makes one wonder whether the DCTC wouldn't do well to attend one of those consciousness-raising seminars to which major corporations subject their executives.

Once again, I question the DCTC's production choices. While this play makes for fine children's theatre, that's not what the DCTC is. What family can afford to take their children to a show which charges $50 a seat? (I suppose I can picture such a family, which, given the close relationship of race to class in this country, probably would need a white mediator in order to appreciate a facet of the black experience.) With the fine company and excellent resources available to it, the DCTC would be better advised to choose more challenging adult fare, even if it's not from a new or minor playwright. Please don't tell me there are too many professional productions of Shakespeare or Mamet these days.

A far more thoughtful examination of the same historical period is the recent film 42 (now available on DVD). It has the decency to treat Jackie Robinson with dignity, tracing his story from his own point of view and not from that of a white interpreter. It's not a great movie, but nonetheless a worthy sports film which capably sets Jackie Robinson's rookie year in its historical and cultural context. Thereby, it demonstrates his significance for both baseball and race relations in these United States.

While we're on the subject of history, Jackie & Me features a galling moment of ahistorical nonsense. Unfortunately, in order to discuss it, I may offend some of my readers, so feel free to quit your browser now. In one scene, Jackie Robinson shows Joey a stack of hate mail, which includes several death threats towards Robinson and his young family. However, they clearly feel the worst of these letters is one which calls Robinson a "nigger," a word which young Joey is barely able to make pass his lips. (This is its sole pronunciation in the play.)

Now, I happen to have a black daughter, and that's not a word I want directed at her or any other person of color. However, "nigger" has taken on its greatest power to offend only in the last decade or so. In Jackie Robinson's time, it was an unwelcome epithet, but hardly taboo or unexpected. To import today's delicate sensibilities to an earlier era is not only silly, it destroys the ability of the past to speak clearly to the present.

Here's what I mean by that: when one reads The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, one is shocked by many of the characters' racism precisely because it is commonplace, unremarkable, and, to the characters themselves, entirely invisible. A plain presentation of the past allows us to see just how alien its environment is to us. That, in turn, prompts us to reflect on the differences between our time and theirs, and perhaps even encourages us to question what atrocities are invisible to us in our day. (In all seriousness, what do you think future generations will think of the thousands of abortions perpetrated in this country each year?)

I took Thing 1, now aged 10, to this production, and he seemed unfazed by the dramatic unveiling of "the 'N' word." Believe it or not, there were warnings posted in the lobby, but he was able to accept the moment as just another element in the torrent of abuse which Jackie Robinson in particular, and all black people of his day in general, faced on a daily basis. I think my son would have been better served by an unvarnished and unsantized presentation of the full ugliness of the racism his sister's people faced in this great country not too long ago. It's a reality with which all my children will have to contend, as all our nation's people still do.