{"id":61948,"date":"2022-02-15T10:17:45","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T16:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=61948"},"modified":"2022-02-14T21:55:34","modified_gmt":"2022-02-15T03:55:34","slug":"carleton-bluford-and-the-process-of-cleaning-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/carleton-bluford-and-the-process-of-cleaning-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Carleton Bluford and The Process of Cleaning Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Actor Matthew Sincell is curled up inside a chalk line in Janice Chan’s set for Plan-B Theatre’s production of “The Clean-up Project, photo by Sharah Meservy.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat a tremendously hostile world a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. And the reason for this is because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares with a rat.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u2013 Colonel Landa<\/h4>\n

In the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds<\/i>, a 2009 film by auteur Quentin Tarantino, an officer of the SS sits airily across from a farmer in the French countryside, drinking milk, and putting questions to the Frenchman with such politeness that \u2014 even as spectators \u2014 we start to feel menaced. Perrier is hiding Jewish friends under the floorboards and, as the friendliness of Colonel Landa falls into contingency, we wonder what we would do in this same situation. Does Perrier save himself and his three daughters, or betray his friends to the Nazis?<\/h4>\n

A similarly awful dilemma lives at the near-future bloody center of Carleton Bluford\u2019s new play, The Clean-Up Project<\/i>, premiering at Plan-B Theatre Company on February 17th<\/sup>. The writing process was not only influenced by Tarantino, but dystopian cinema like The Children of Men <\/i>and Lars Von Trier\u2019s Dogville<\/i>.<\/h4>\n

When I read the description for the setting \u2014 \u201cThe stage should be drawn out in chalk. The walls, tables, everything should be laid out like an architectural drawing of the space\u201d \u2014 I thought immediately of a long-ago production of Rhinoc\u00e9ros<\/i>, a Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco play from the Theatre of the Absurd. Bluford gives us a play world with no wall protecting the protagonists. It draws on the abstraction of Dogville, <\/i>but this imagery is part of a wide dystopian river, stretching back to Yevgeny <\/span>Zamyatin\u2019s novel We<\/i> and embodying the words of political philosophers like Hannah Arendt, who warns us that totalitarianism is a rupture between public life and private.<\/h4>\n

\u201cAnother police siren is heard. They are both incredibly still. The siren grows louder and louder and then it passes. A beat later they continue on.\u201d The Black couple we meet in the beginning of The Clean-Up Project <\/i>would like to ignore the chaos outside of their non-walls, but refugees and state power will soon intrude on their relationship. Speaking about how Children of Men <\/i>affected him, Bluford wrote to me, \u201cWe all know what really matters in this world and we get caught up in stupid things\/trains of thought that consume our life. It sometimes takes a huge \u2026 something to shake us out of it.\u201d With his new play, the Huge Something that Bluford drops the audience into is the Clean-Up Project: an uprising by Black Americans against white Americans. Like Perrier in Inglourious Basterds<\/i>, the Black couple Melvin and Jordan are hiding white friends.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Carleton Bluford<\/p><\/div>\n

The Clean Up-Project <\/i>departs in tone and form from, say, Bluford’s Mama<\/i>, which premiered at Plan-B in 2015. Mama uses non-fiction interspersed with drama to express what it means to be a mother. It could be fairly described as a kind of love letter. It was exactly the dramaturgical gap between Mama<\/em> and The Clean-Up Project<\/em> that led\u00a0 <\/span>me to talking to Bluford about process.\u00a0<\/i><\/h4>\n

From the mise-\u00e8n-scene<\/i>, we understand implicitly that Melvin and Jordan\u2019s friends cannot stay hidden. We understand they live in a \u201ctremendously hostile world.\u201d And we understand that Bluford, with his cooked-up dystopia, wants us to feel the horror inside the Black American experience in the early 21st century. The chalk walls cannot keep out the state. Indeed, in The Clean-Up Project, <\/i>the state holds all the keys to all the doors. The city \u2014 the polis <\/i>\u2014 comes airily into the home through the police.<\/h4>\n

Like many authors, Bluford (also a film and TV actor who appeared on two episodes of The Connors<\/i> in 2021) \u201cgot into theatre\u2026because art has the ability to change hearts and minds.\u201d Yet Bluford says:<\/h4>\n

[I] didn’t want to only give the audience a chance to think about it on the car ride on the way home, I wanted them to be complicit in the results of the play just as America asks us to be complicit in making decisions whether we agree with the choices or not. I, myself, want to walk away from this show wondering what the next plan of \u201cAction\u201d is for me.<\/h4>\n

He refers there to a dilemma eventually put to the audience. Bluford has written a dystopian play \u2014 one could call it, though, a cultural-emotional reflection of real life \u2014 but besides that, he\u2019s written some theatre that shuffles off the genre expectation of victory or doom for the characters we meet in the beginning. The Clean-Up Project<\/i> is visually deconstructive from the outset and then, in the climax, it deconstructs its own narrative and through an avatar of state power asks the audience to decide the fate of characters we have come to feel for. We become complicit in the results of the play, as we are already complicit in the power dynamics \u2014 or \u201cpower distance\u201d as anthropologists might put it\u2014 inhering our social systems.<\/h4>\n

Like a poem, a play \u201cshould not mean, but be,\u201d and through his aesthetic choice to break the Fourth Wall, Bluford takes The Clean-Up Project<\/i> from meaning to being. We become the system in the end of his play, forced to follow its logic of justice. No doubt this will be uncomfortable for many viewers but trying to understand the violence against Black people in America was never comfortable. Like the Oscar-winning short film Two Distant Strangers <\/i>by Travon Free, Bluford\u2019s play brings oppressed and oppressor intimately together and refuses to leave us reassured that good will prevail.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

A Black man from Utah, Bluford drew on his own experiences and easy\/hard conversations over the years for The Clean-Up Project<\/i>. A developmental workshop with Plan-B Theatre, \u201coffered varying perspectives, voices, and opinions that were instrumental in the creation of the play. They all helped me affirm and challenge my own points of view.\u201d Speaking from my own experience as a playwright, I know those workshops can be critical in fine-tuning moments for characters, giving them the depth and contradictions needed to be engaging. Unlike screenwriting, playwriting can have robust, on-its-feet collaboration during the early and middle drafts, something Bluford embraces. In an email exchange, Bluford sent me a quote from architect Bjarke Engles, whose radically inclusive philosophy is, \u201cYes is More.\u201d<\/h4>\n

A priceless benefit of workshopping \u2014 and peer-to-peer conversations about the deep underpinnings of a piece \u2014 is that such exchanges can sharpen our attention to issues like \u201csocial substitutability.\u201d It\u2019s a concept that figures mightily in The Clean-Up Project<\/em>. Credited to cultural anthropologist Raymond Kelly, it describes the phenomenon whereby sides are drawn in some conflict and any member comes to represent the whole. Any conservative becomes a stand-in for the Trump administration. Anyone who criticizes Joe Rogan becomes a stand-in for \u201ccancel culture.\u201d I asked Bluford how he struggled with this concept during the writing process and he told me, \u201cI didn’t struggle with the concept as a writer or as a person. I very much understand it.\u201d<\/h4>\n

At times, process and person are the same. When Bluford \u201c[hears] of a new case of an innocent [BIPOC] person being murdered, [he goes] through this struggle\u201d between the instinct for empathy and \u201cthe other side of me feeling like a violent revolution may be the only thing that makes actual change, like the French thought years ago.\u201d Ultimately, he fights against the second impulse, but through the dramatic architecture of The Clean-Up Project<\/i> wants us to feel the contours of other people\u2019s choices being imposed on us. Not to frighten us per se, but to help us see the contours of our cultural-social system and urge us to remake them with less cruelty.<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Sharah Meservy from Plan-B’s production of “The Clean-up Project”<\/p><\/div>\n

The world premier of Carleton Bluford’s The Clean-up Project<\/em>, Plan-B Theatre Company<\/a>, streaming and in-person (Rose Wagner Arts Center, Salt Lake City), Feb. 17 – 27<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat a tremendously hostile world a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. And the reason for this is because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that, Monsieur, is what a Jew shares with a rat.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1701,"featured_media":61959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[2254,278],"class_list":["post-61948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theatre","tag-carleton-bluford","tag-plan-b-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/0.17-1-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-13 19:46:40","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1701"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61948"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61961,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61948\/revisions\/61961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}