Last year, with the help of a Kellogg Grant for Racial Healing, more than 160 students, staff, and faculty at Western Michigan University were interviewed about race relations on campus. The result is a documentary theatre piece called Check Your Privilege, premiering this week.
http://youtu.be/-tR-x_4ICj4
Calvin College Professor of Theatre Stephanie Sandberg is the head director of the production. This is the type of theatre she’s known for. Six years ago, Sandberg helped WMU create a similar play called Seven Passages—the Stories of Gay Christians.
“It’s a kind of theatre where you’re bound by using only the words that people use to describe their experiences and their stories,” she says.
“So it’s theatre in the sense that you still have actors performing it. We’re not putting the actual people on stage. But it’s trying to get at this sense of truth in language and in story that brings about a kind of authenticity that you might get from fictional theatre, but not necessarily.”
Sandberg says Kalamazoo County has a 50 on the disparity index according to the census. That means about half of the white population in a Kalamazoo neighborhood would have to move to another part of the county in order to desegregate the area.
“And so I wasn’t surprised to hear that that reality was happening at the university as well," says Sandberg. "Even though there’s things…we try to put measures in place that stop that, it’s just not happening. In the United States right now—today—we have a dissimilarity index that is worse than apartheid South Africa. We’ve got to do something about this. We have to do something about this.”
“What was a little bit sobering for me is that so much of this still exists now in 2014," says associate WMU theatre professor Dwandra Lampkin. "So as we get to hear these stories they don’t date back to the 1960s during the Civil Rights. They are right here, right now.”
Because the play uses real interviews from Western Michigan University staff and students, the audience feels like they’re part of an honest, open discussion about race and privilege.
“We have shown that it’s possible for a really diverse group of people to work together and make something happen. And we’ve modeled for society what kind of community can be like," says Sandberg. "And I’d like to see what we did here just grow exponentially.”
Check Your Privilege runs through October 12th at WMU’s York Arena Theatre.
