EDINBURGH 2023: June Carryl Guest Blog

June Carryl, Writer of Blue on how theatre has the power to highlight societal progress and the obstructions to progress, when those “in charge” are threatened by the change as it happens.

“I” is a weird word, a magical word, “I:” self in action, laying claim to all that is, and language is its bridge. I feel. I want. I am. One becomes, the centre of the action and of perspective. Powerful word, “I.”

“We/us” the collective I, defines a community, boundaries: inside versus outside, us versus them. So, when you’re Black and female (like me) in a culture where “we” equals straight, white and male, language itself feels borrowed; outright stolen. It’s a mind fuck. Flesh and bone be damned, you don’t count; you don’t even exist. And so, to speak is to lay claim to what was never intended for you. “I” becomes a revolution.

Theatre has power. To illuminate, to expose. To question what is. And to bring change. Bodies gather, often in the dark, bear witness as words fly from the mouths of other bodies, bodies one can reach out and touch. We love. We hate. And hopefully we come away changed. Because that’s what theatre does, can do, like nothing else.

Some definitions: I am an actor. I am a playwright. I am first generation American Black African and Caribbean. I live and work in the US. And I am a stranger in the world. However, I am not powerless. I have words.

The murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 changed a narrative. It was the beginning of the plague years, an eruption of disruption, one not guaranteed to stick, though one could definitively say Elon Wanna-bes and their Moms for Liberty wives were shook. Lynchings have rarely been a private affair, but the dead eyed stare of his murderer burned itself into the collective consciousness. The Black Lives Matter movement collectivised a response to state sanctioned violence that united Black, Brown, and Allied communities.

BLUE is a conversation about change. The people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th 2021 were the collective “I” in action. Their slogan, “Stop the steal,” actually meant stop the (perceived) steal from me, from an “us” believing the world isn’t just changing but is being taken. [Im]migrants, women’s bodily autonomy, the right to exist as someone who is LGBTQIA+; all are under attack as the straight, white, Christian(ish) male “I” claws back centre stage - in language above all else. The problem, however, is that change comes, will we or no.

BLUE is about violence and the State, and about the State and the Other; it is about the shift from decades of killing with impunity, without complaint or comment, taking a back seat to public outrage and demands for a new paradigm. When the collective “I,” that excludes “others” is threatened with change, again and again it lurches backward, whether by way of nostalgia or outright tyranny, it seeks the erasure of difference, as if somehow the very existence of difference were an affront. The rightward shift toward monolith and elimination of any and all deviation, by violence, if necessary, cures what ails. Dictators know this and make bogeymen of ethnic, gender and other “outliers” in order to recapture the idealized patriarch, merciful but whose justice is swift and terrible. Donald Trump is just a poor man’s Hitler, but the song remains the same. George Floyd’s murder presaged January 6th. Stay in your place, his murderer said. So did the people who marched on the capitol. If we can’t have it all, we’ll burn it down.

Blue makes its international debut at the Edinburgh Festival. My hope: revolution.

Blue will be performed at 5.05pm in Assembly George Square (The Box) from 2nd – 28th August (Not 9th)

Booking link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/blue

Photo credit: David Adly Garcia

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