Let's All Talk About Bias — WRITE. THINK. DREAM.

Theater Three's production of Funny, You Don't Act Like A Negro is a needed story for a difficult political/cultural moment. Dealing with race, culture, class, and linguistic boundaries, this show tackled even the most uncomfortable topics head-on. Opening night featured a packed house for the brand-new playwright M. Denise Lee.

Lee organized the narrative as a series of vignettes with the main storyline carrying through from start to finish. Some vignettes were meant to be instructive, some interactive, like the hilariously painful "Are They Racist or just an Asshole?" Others were, quite frankly, heartbreaking. Interwoven throughout the play were stories of big and small moments of discrimination and hate told by members of the Dallas community.

The nexus of each of these stories was bias—both implicit and explicit. The choice to name the characters by number and gender was, to my mind, more than just a convenient way of denoting what are essentially ensemble actors in a vignette driven play. It points to the idea that the experiences and stories presented are ubiquitous. Take any family and see if you don't find a similar set of problems, Lee seems to say. Societally, we transmit these ideas down to the next generation even if individually, we're well-meaning. And in fact, some of us aren’t at all well-meaning.

Liza Marie Gonzalez (Woman 3) had me on the edge of my seat with her heartbreaking monologue near the end of the show. David Lugo (Man 3) showed off his improv chops in the gameshow vignette, leaving audiences painfully laughing as he exited the stage. Jazzay Jabbar (Woman 1) and Gerald Taylor II (Man 1) did well with characters that portrayed strength alongside a sense of stuck-in-betweenness. Jessica D. Turner (Woman 2) and Gregory Lush (Man 2) each had moments where they crossed into the darkest side of racism—and each did their job to effectively deliver a warning. The cast members in this show skillfully portrayed a broad range in terms of character, emotion, and narrative. I never knew what was coming next, but the cast made me believe it in every case.

Each corner of the stage was used to great effect both in terms of staging and design (Jeffrey Schmidt). Lighting (Jon Felt) and sound (Claudia V. Jenkins) supported the highly versatile set of stories presented in quick succession.

The scenes between the three children (Alexis Muturi, Summer Stern, and Juliana Gamino) were some of the most powerful in the entire play, at least for me. They reminded me of my own girlhood growing up as a white, bilingual, Christian girl in a community of Asian Muslims. The girls’ scenes played out through rhythm games, the pace of which I recognized from my childhood, but the words of which I did not. I know tons of rhythm games, but not a single one of them is in English.

Certainly, I didn't cast aside my privilege as a white, Christian, American at that time—I carried it with me in every beat of the games. But I did receive a tremendous gift from a very early age. I understood deeply even then, and perhaps most of all then, that things like skin color, religion, and culture never need to be a barrier to relationship.

I hope you'll pardon the above personal meandering as I finally reach my point. It could be said this play will not reach the audience who needs it. Maybe there's some truth in that, but it's also true that there is much to be learned even by "woke" attendees. No matter my own upbringing, I still had things to learn from this story; it still revealed ways I can do better at managing my biases.

This play is tied together with narratives that range from poignant to uncomfortable to tragic. Each story is a gift that wakes us up to our own failures, biases, and yes, sometimes to our wins. Most of all it puts an audience full of individuals physically in a room together to examine how we can all be better, more compassionately, connected.

Credit is due to director Christie Vela for finding an excellent balance between power, heartbreak, and levity, leaving audiences with plenty to think about by the end of the show. By now, it should hardly need saying what my opinion is: go see this powerful show before it ends on March 15. Buy your ticket at https://www.theatre3dallas.com/.