Race and Poverty in: 'Bop: The North Star'

BOP: The North Star is an original play (premiered at the Kitchen Theater Sunday evening!) written and directed by Emilie Stark-Menneg. It was created through a collaborative process involving the actors, musicians and dancers in the play, as well as with Cornell English professor Prof. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, upon whose poetry the play is based. The play incorporates six poems from Professor Van Clief-Stefanon’s newest collection of poetry, Open Interval, recently nominated for a National Book Award. The focal poem, which returns several times in the 60-minute play, is entitled (can you guess?) “Bop: The North Star.”

Like a lot of poetry, the play starts out enigmatic to the extreme with abstract music, a 7th grade girl and a definition of “Miss Ann” — a titular greeting from a black woman to a white woman, or a derogatory name for a black girl who acts like a white girl. I was confused, and actually found reading through the poems easier (yeah, former English majors!). The poems themselves can never be fully understood, of course, never fully fleshed out, even by their author. As such, the play is free to be as enigmatic or interpretative as it feels is appropriate. If a play could feel such a thing. It is not always easy to understand exactly how Stark-Menneg et al conceptualize moments from the poems into concrete scenarios, but the moods and the characters come through flawlessly.

BOP: The North Star, like Van Clief-Stefanon’s poetry, explores issues of race and identity in America, bouncing around time periods and genres to muse on the everlasting and overarching presence, in all senses of the word, of race in our nation, and its particularly strong presence for African-American women. The play is funny and enjoyable at times, and profoundly disturbing and uncomfortable at others (though, to be fair, still enjoyable then too), but it takes on an issue that is crucial in American society. Through the funny moments and the uncomfortable ones, we, as a nation, must recognize race and value it, not shove it under a desk to be ignored with well-intentioned color-blindness. The play brings race to the foreground in a way that is accessible, if not 100 percent comprehensible, for the audience, drawing on such well-known figures as Harriet Tubman and Scarlett O’Hara.

The entirety of the play is accompanied by a set of talented musicians, including Cornell’s own Stephanie Jenkins ’10 on banjo and vocals, which she does spectacularly by the way — props to Stephanie for the wheezy, breezy, southern comfort singing. I thought you captured the mood perfectly. They serenade us throughout the play, sometimes controlling the actors with their music, sometimes accompanying them, sometimes singing in tandem. Both the dance and the music in the play are constantly changing, mixing past and present, crazy and calm, joyful and angry. Like everything else on stage, they are mutable, multi-purpose and carry multiple meanings. Take, for example, the “sail,” which begins as the sail for a boat, becomes a blanket for sleeping on, then a projector screen, and finally a sail once again.

Van Clief-Stefanon’s poems also appear throughout the play. “Tandem,” “She’ll Wait,” “Miss Ann” and “Black Hole” are read basically word for word, during moments from the play that draw from their tones and characters. “Song for Bill” is broken up quite a bit more, and serves to set the final scene, it’s “story” being translated almost literally onto the stage. “Bop: The North Star,” of course appears several times — beginning, middle and end — to guide the audience through the story.“Oh, Harriet, who did not need the poise / of freedom knocked into your head like sense, who found it more / than possible to sleep, pistol shoved deep into your pocket / along this route, I cannot tell a dipper from Orion.” The poem also references Cornell University, and the Cornell Prison Education Program at Auburn Correctional Facility, for which yours truly is a teaching assistant and which has been, as I imagine it is for Van Clief-Stefanon, an incredible experience.

I’m thinking it’s probably time to start begging the participants for an encore performance (or two or three) because most of you will have missed this incredible play by the time you read this. The play takes race and identity and puts them together for your consideration, while wrapping them up together with all the emotions and characters of the play — Harriet, Scarlett, Miss Ann, the 7th grade girl, the musicians — fear, excitement, joy, farce, vanity, love, lust, exhaustion, balance and the never-ending search for balance and safety. See it if you can. It is well performed, powerful, and a testament to the creativity and compassion of Ithaca and Cornell University.