A Letter to Obama: Taking art personally

Dear Mr. President,

I thought of you last weekend, choking back audible sobs as I witnessed a terminally ill father pass through his last moments on earth. I had spent all summer watching him mask his pain and loneliness, gracefully navigating his deterioration from Multiple Sclerosis, trying not to be a bother to his to two grown sons.

He was not my father. In fact, I didn’t even know him personally.

But his story hit home, brought to life by actor Wendell Pierce in the new play Broke-ology, which opens at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater on Oct. 5. In two hours of theater, I was transported to a living room in Kansas City, Kan., where the power of art helped me make a seemingly unlikely connection between this family and mine.

My mother, too, suffers from a chronic disease that has been slowly eating away at her since I was a sophomore in college. On our last visit, just days before I saw this play, I rushed Mom to the emergency room in her rural North Carolina town. It was the eve of my departure, and she was having trouble breathing. A bug that dogged her for months last winter had returned, and her already compromised system was having a hard time fighting it off.

I still can’t shake the image of her curled up on her side in the hospital bed, covered with a thin, faded industrial blanket. How does she really manage on her own, at 72, in her tiny cabin in the woods, while my sister and I are busy trying to make it as artists hundreds of miles away in sprawling New York? How does she take the meager $100 I can send her each month and stretch it to cover the doughnut hole in her Medicare prescription coverage? How does she remain hopeful?

I saw myself and my worries reflected in both of the brothers portrayed in Nathan Louis Jackson’s deeply moving first play. Ennis and I are the older siblings and we both mask our fear with quick wit. Like the younger brother, Malcolm, I have pursued a life that took me far from home, distancing me from my mom’s daily struggles with her illness.

Naturally, my family’s story differs in many ways from the Kings’: My mother, who raised my sister and I on her own, is white – like yours. King is black with two sons. My mother emigrated from London and we have lived all over the United States. King raised his sons in his Midwestern hometown. My mother has a graduate school education. King never went to college.

This play cuts though all that. Its power – and the power of all art at its best – is its ability to deftly unearth the universal in an experience without losing the magic of its specificity. It is the reason I became a choreographer and my sister a director; my mom, a retired art teacher, has always pushed us – like William King does his sons – to harness our gifts. Our collaborative arts company bears her name, Angela’s Pulse, a humble attempt to ensure her spirit lasts far beyond this lifetime.

I know you understand art’s power well; your presidential campaign skillfully aligned with artists to galvanize support. I also know you like the theater. Last season, in fact, you made a high profile visit to Lincoln Center to see Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which explores race, identity and migration in the early 20th Century through the lens of black boarding house residents in Pittsburgh.

That show’s Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright, August Wilson, died in 2005; but his legacy lives on in shows like Broke-ology. Jackson, the show’s creator, just completed Julliard's graduate theater program this year. This is his first play. Still, the work is mature.

Through rollicking games of Dominos and foreboding silences, Broke-ology reminded me of the complexity of loyalty, freedom and resistance in the present moment. The show's lynchpin is powerful portrayals of love – particularly between black fathers, sons and brothers – portrayals striking both for their authenticity and their rarity in popular media and theater.

If we’re lucky, Jackson will build on Wilson’s legacy by inviting us into more living rooms like this one in Kansas City, where we can do some real listening and soul-searching.

I think you could use such an invitation. I’ll even buy you a ticket myself. And feel free to bring Congress to the theater with you. Because as the country faces a still-slumping economy and flailing health care plan, our elected representatives may need to be reminded – in a way that only art can manage – about the people who really hang in the balance.

Sincerely,

Paloma McGregor