 So, good afternoon everyone. Thanks for coming. I know there's a lot to do and it's Friday at five in New York City, so thanks for coming and hearing about Young Jean's performance. Jean, please play like sort of after fascism, which is kind of what I'm talking about today. So, I'm Petra Sheevar and I teach at Brown, and I had the luck of watching Young Jean workshop straight white men with college students before she worked, after and before she worked with her professional collaborators. So, I'm going to go straight into talking off script because it'll just take me longer if I talk this way, but this is sort of me re-encountering a play I wrote about before the election of Donald Trump and then thinking about the revised version after the election of Donald Trump and trying to think some problems together. So, I'm here to revisit Young Jean Lee straight white men after the election of Donald Trump in an era filled with what political theorist Juliet Hooker would call white grievance, which Hooker defines at least in part as, quote, an inability to accept loss, both material and symbolic. And I can't recommend this essay more. It was in the recent edition of South Atlantic Quarterly and the title of the essay is Black Protest, White Grievance on the problem of white political imaginations, not shaped by loss. It's just like a super, super smart essay. So, as she explains later in the essay, white ignorance is a crucial feature of the politics of white grievance. It allows whites to deny the undearned advantages that they've accrued as a result of white supremacy and it also makes it possible for them to reject the assumption of any responsibility as individuals for its continuation and that's a quote from Juliet Hooker. She writes in the aftermath of the 2016 election considering various forms of white grievance in the form of movements antagonistic to black protest and black activism in the face of continued state violence against African Americans. Reading her work recently with my graduate students, however, made me think again of young Jean Lee straight white men and it's perhaps different relevance in 2017 than in 2014 when I spent about a year writing an essay about this play in relation to debt, labor and neoliberalism. My first thought was perhaps I'd barked up the wrong tree so much more concerned with debt and the soft neoliberalism of the Obama era. A month or so on I think it might be more productive to think the problem of white grievance alongside the critique of debt politics that the play focuses on given that the play begins with the issue of white privilege and ends with a commentary on student debt. I particularly invested in thinking these issues together as Lee does so as to undo some of our assumptions about the class base of white grievance meaning we must include college educated whites that supposedly know better more robustly in our assessment of the current political moment. Some of the marchers in Charlottesville were college students suggesting that white resentment is not the provenance of the so-called uneducated in this country. It's a claim that drives me absolutely batshit crazy. It's with this in mind that I revisit the college educated 40-somethings and young Jean Lee's play. How many of you have seen or read straight white men? Okay, that's good. I'll try to go fast. I don't have to summarize then. So straight white men workshopped at Brown in 2013 and so I'm going to go back to the essay that I wrote about that production and then come around to the newer production and my thoughts about it. So as I wrote in 2015, Lee and her cast explained Matt, who's one of the characters in the play's Failure to Achieve is that his failure to achieve is his way of not enacting his privilege as a straight white man. His rejection of being one who takes it upon himself to change the world, to speak for others, to shake things up for society's benefit. At the beginning of the play, Matt has placed his former revolutionary ideals and activism behind him. Rather, Matt sees his primary purposes quote-unquote being useful and quote-unquote not taking up space. Two ways of doing what Lee's Facebook friends suggested white men could do so as to reject the privileges that they cannot or are going back to Juliet Hooker's suggestion. Matt's rejection of privilege is also a rejection of his father and his brother's ambitions for his career and personal happiness. His statements in the play are at once a sign of self-abnegation and a rejection of a career that's productive of self-appreciation without being useful. So in the Brown production version, this is sort of the last piece of the play. His final conversation with his father brings the point home. He says, you know what, Matt? Orson Welles, he failed many times before he was successful. Matt, Orson Welles, what did Orson Welles ever do? He made citizen cane, Matt, sarcastically, what a gift, what a gift. Ed leaves the room, Matt sits alone, and so the end of the play is with him sort of staring out at the audience. In contrast to his earlier begrudging acknowledgement of the value of his father's useful straight white male heart surgeon, Matt dismisses Welles so as to abjure self-expression as a world worthwhile activity. This scene is notably the only one where Matt refers to himself as a straight white male. By connecting Matt's critique of straight white male privilege with an unwillingness to dedicate himself to an aspirational career choice, straight white men risk conflating not wanting to be a straight white male with not wanting success predicated on financial gain or the cultural capital that comes with self-expression in the public sphere or the approbation that comes from fighting against capital or capitalism as an occupational activity. I'm thinking a lot about what I saw in the previews today in some of the earlier presentations. I would argue that a closer read of the play might illuminate Matt's desire to be useful as a refusal of the self-making performance of human capital. If you read your Foucault, you know that people sort of worth as performing their own desires as what Foucault puts forward is a sort of way of self-making under neoliberalism, which he does a long genealogy of, but I think we could agree it's kind of an 80s, 90s odds ethos in the U.S. So Matt makes a claim about wanting to be useful twice in straight white men, and this is in the earlier version of the play. The first is about halfway through the play where Matt says, I don't need therapy, I need to feel useful. Drew, what makes you feel useful, Matt, being here helping dad, later after a job interview scene, which I'll return to if he returns to this theme? And what about all that community organizing you used to do, Matt? What happened with that? Matt, nothing, look, I don't want anything more than what I have now, which is the ability to be useful to dad. Why do you guys have such a problem with that? It's ridiculous to think this is the best you can get, Drew. You don't think you can be happier than crying at the dinner table? Thanks, Drew. Okay, I know I'm driving everyone crazy with this, but it's so obvious to me what the problem is. You need to go to therapy. You're such an amazing person. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to lead a happy and productive life. Drew, I don't care about self-actualization or self-expression or becoming my best self. I don't believe in any of those things. Then what do you believe in? Being useful. So Matt responds not by denying the idea that he's depressed or that he needs to go to therapy, but by rejecting the very terms through which a self is appreciated under neoliberal capitalism. Self-expression, self-actualization and being one's best self. And so similarly Matt's refusal or inability to perform the mock interview is a renunciation of quote-unquote acting like a white male and a refusal to act as an agent of neoliberal self-appreciation. So when he participates in the mock interview for a copy editing job he does not engage in a number of behaviors that are usually associated with white male mastery. He slumps, he stumbles, he makes a weak case for his skills. His brother Jake in contrast stands up straight, talks a good game and takes over space. He manspreads. I mean it's kind of amazing. So more crucially here Jake sells himself as someone invested in his self-appreciation without actually talking about his skills. He makes a convincing to the onstage audience of his father and the other brothers at least a claim for why he is a 40-year-old man should be considered for an entry-level job. Yet Matt even after seeing Jake's example and if you know the play it's almost like painful to watch these two scenes sort of on top of one another so he can't do what Jake does and his failed mimesis where he sort of half-heartedly claims he's creative because he appreciates creativity and others shows that he remains wedded to an assessment of his actual laboring activities rather than selling his affinities as a form of human capital. Neoliberalism seems like super quaint these days. Really weird to read this. So of course this does not mean that Matt does not work. He engages in acts of domestic maintenance inside the home. He works as an office temp outside of the home. But the domestic labor he does or aspires to do, elder care, is feminized and outsourced to poor women, women of color and others who do not have human capital under globalized capitalism to avoid such intensive and poorly paid work. And it's really striking how the people of color always like at the outside of this play kind of being referenced in this interesting way when we can talk about that. So thus despite his dedication and the difficulty of this work his family dismisses his worth as Ed says if I need a nurse I can afford one. Meaning that this care work is to be done by people other than Matt for whom such labor is not an efficient or robust use of Ed or Matt's investments. In this light Matt's aspiration to not be a straight white male is anti-aspirational in a general sense and is a particular refusal of the privileged position of self-appreciation by a first world subject. So the relationship between his aspiration and debt is tricky in the 2013 version of the play and that changes later because the play doesn't tell us exactly how to deal with this character's psychological debts or it also doesn't give us a clean read on Matt's economic debts. And Lee engages very ironically with the idea of the familial inheritance. So there are these scenes in which they try to get to the thing that like hurt Matt but what they land on is this sort of moment of being in college in the 80s and 90s which is much more like the experience that Young Jean Lee and I had because we're kind of generationally of the same age. So the play comes back to this point repeatedly if ironically when Jake blames Matt's experience at a quote-unquote liberal arts college for his problems the fullest explanation comes after the failed job interview and it says I don't believe that Matt, just like I don't believe you couldn't be better in that interview. You don't want to try, tell me Matt, what happened? Jake, I know what happened. Ed, please enlighten us. Jake, he got brainwashed by all those ethnic studies people and now he's totally paralyzed. Ed, what? Okay, this is what happens to a guy like Matt when he goes to a small liberal arts college. You sit in class and get told by women and queer people and minorities that you don't understand shit, which is true. You're taught that you have unfair advantages and that you take opportunities away from everyone else, which is also true. If you want to help, you're either being paternalistic or it's not your fight. Then if you try to shut up and stay out of the way people hate you for being a loser. So no matter what you do, you're fucked. It's clear that Lee's being tongue-in-cheek here yet given that the play has a pedagogical imperative to interrogate white male privilege we're constantly framing the characters as their sort of adherence to straight white male then. And given that straight white men openly follows a well-made play structure we're constantly looking for an explanation for each character's allegiance or lack thereof to sort of white male them. And in this play then women are notably absent from this play. Matt's liberal arts experience is the best candidate for causing his current malaise. And an academic audience living in the conditions that Jake describes as Matt's past might be a special condition to give Jake's comments credit despite how firmly Lee's tongue is placed in her cheek. And so more materially there's a question of Matt's student loans. Matt's a freak. All those years of banging his head against a wall as a community organizer and then not letting Dad pay off any of his student loans. All that debt and nothing to show for it. So Matt's brother Jake if you've seen the play you know frames educational debt as sort of individualized risk management. All that debt and nothing to show for it. The frame of course is a neo liberal mode of valuation which alongside Matt's role as sort of a liberal hero makes him sort of guilty of his culpable for his own situation. Matt's culpability makes his assumption of monetary debt a psychological problem rather than an economic reality inverting a more plausible relationship of cause and effect. Watching the play I asked myself might Matt's inability to cope be an effect of his debt rather than its cause. And so my emphasis on debt here was not a major player necessarily in the production at Brown and then Young Jean Lee rewrote the play and debt becomes much more important so I want to sort of switch to what happens when she does that. So in the revised version of the play the issue of debt is more clearly marked as is the intensity of Matt's domestic labor. He's constantly cleaning up after his brothers are serving them surrogating the women of color that are conveniently kept off stage and the debt concern is more squarely part of the play. So the play still ends with a sort of riff on Orson Welles but it's slightly different so I want to read the scene in terms of how it was rewritten. So Drew Exit, Matt sits on the sofa looking exhausted and ashamed of himself. Ed sits down next to him and puts his arm around his shoulder comfortingly and Matt cries into his shoulder. Ed pulls away, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a check. Matt, I can't take that money, Dad. Ed, why not? Matt, I didn't earn it. You're living in this house, aren't you? Did you pay for this house? No, but I'm helping out. It's different. Ed, what does it matter if you earn the money or not? Take the check, just take it. I don't want it. I don't understand this. Who's going to thank you for doing this, Matt? Who? Matt. No one. Ed, alright, it'll only make people dislike you. And I quote this passage at length that clearly references the role of privilege that Hooker describes in her comment on the white grievance as well as echoing the conversation that begins at play in the form of literally a game called privilege which I'm going to talk about, the game based on a perhaps literally written over an old monopoly game complete with excuses and denial cards forces its players to acknowledge their privilege and a brief excerpt will suffice here. Jake says, what I said was not sexist slash racist slash homophobic because I was joking. Pay $50 to the lesbian and gay services center. Jake pays. Drew mimes explosively shitting the dice on the floor. Sound of the garage door opening. Jake and Drew look up. Drew hurries to finish his turn, moving his thimble forward seven spaces. Drew, shit. Jake, denial card. Drew draws a denial, formerly chance card. Drew reading, I don't have white privilege because it does not exist. Unquote. Get stopped by the police for no reason and go directly to jail. Drew draws his thimble away from the jail square. So the book ending of the play with privilege and debt links two pieces not often linked in conversations about white grievance. The fact the conceptions of and the actual experience of debt can intersect with white grievance, especially among college educated persons who are generally exempted as being seen as part of the most virulent public face of white grievance, which is the critique I'm making. Yet one, the excessive debt levels now accrued by working in middle class people who are trying to attend college, does not excuse the fact of white privilege in public spaces, as Lee's play shows. Matt's seeming refusal to take what he has not earned is an odd and interesting way of disavowing white ignorance while not exactly becoming part of the solution. Perhaps Matt's stumbling grappling with his own privilege as a beginning rather than an example of cruel optimism which I suggested just two years ago. That said, I'm now much more aware of the low simmering disappointment and rage in many of the other characters' hearts. I do not think this is ironic. And perhaps this is why some of the most outsized reactions to this play have been less with the dramaturgical fineries, my own obsession with the plays like Links to Miller and Ibsen, which are deep and super interesting, than with the loud hip-hop music and other metatheatrical aspects of the play. Perhaps this is because the play reveals quote, and this is a stage direction from the play, quote, the pre-show music, curtain speech and transitions are all part of this play. They should create a sense that the show is under the control of people who are not straight white men, quote. And this is a stage direction that was added to the 2015 script that's not in the earlier one. And this is exactly the kind of liberal eglaterianism that Juliet Hooker describes when she says, quote, if the so-called liberal democracies in the West are to become truly racially eglaterian, white citizens would accept the loss of political mastery. They will have to accept being ruled in turn. So that's Juliet Hooker. This state, and I'm saying this state, perhaps temporarily imagined in the presidency of Barack Obama, is one that inspires so much white grievance the material and the symbolic level. It's for this reason that I read this play admittedly revised very differently in 2017 than I did in 2014. My hopes and fears are in different places, even as Matt's days sitting on the couch. So today I'm much less interested in Matt's paralysis than the low simmering rage lurking underneath some of Drew and Jake's irony. Although the revision of the play takes the primal scene of Matt's undoing out of the elite liberal arts classroom, that's a scene that Young Jean Lee cuts, actually. I still think those classrooms, as well as who is in them and who is not as relevant here, I teach fewer Matt's Jake's and Drew's than I used to teach. There's a middle class gap, particularly among white middle class students in many very elite institutions where admission cycles are more likely to bring together much richer and much poorer students in a classroom, and those economic disparities often end up with sort of political similarities, kind of interestingly. And leaving those sort of the sort of white middle and blue collar class out in the cold. For those in the middle, and I know that there are people who are not white who are in those class positions, so I'm not disputing that. For those in the middle, financial aid packages, even at a place like Brown, asset students and their families take substantial debt, linking grievance to debt once more. There are a sizable part of people who voted for Trump who are in the state of the sort of class position that need to be considered. The aggrieved are not being paralyzed by our insistence on teaching ethnic studies, feminism and the like, so much as hearing about what we do out in the sort of media, not by being in the classroom itself. The media always already thriving these days to be an arch enemy to the project of racial aggleterianism. I'm hopeful then that I will see more maps and jakes and droos in my classroom, and that there will be there without accruing substantial debt, so that one can take on the issue of white grievance seriously. Again, I'm not in any way here trying to excuse the nightmarish white supremacy at the moment, further erase Latinx-African American, Asian and Native American working class voters or middle class voters, or deny the fact that they have suffered as much or more than white working class and middle class Americans under neoliberalism. I am, however, suggesting that there's work to be done such that we can do what Hooker suggested at the end of her essay, quote, to be good democratic citizens we must peacefully acquiesce to political loss without mobilizing white grievance. So that's all I have to say. Thank you for being here. And I don't really have answers, so I'm glad to discuss things with you, but I don't think I really have answers except to say that we're in an interesting place. My question was about this, you know, you could also just totally answer my question with a no, and that would be fine, but Tish currently is doing safety net. Young Jean Lee is new project that she created with Tish students, which I saw last night, and I found it really interesting to think about in conversation with straight white men and I was wondering if you had seen it, and if so obviously not some kind of I haven't, but I would love to hear about it. Oh, there you go. I know her I have seen her Facebook research on the play but not the play itself, so I know she's been asking these really interesting questions about debt and class online, but I haven't seen the work, so. But if you had like a one-minute version of it that I could, yeah. You started to say something earlier, you said I'm thinking about the works in process that I just saw and then you moved on and I'd love to rewind you back to that thought. Yeah, well I'm thinking about cute activist, I'm thinking about millennial feelings about activism, and how they sort of track with an older generation sort of letting go of activism. A lot of straight white men is about making fun of an earlier idealistic age and so it kind of rubbed strangely against this moment in which we moved to having to be in the streets again in a very particular way. I just feel like a generational difference, I guess is a pretty profound one. I think because my own history tracks a little bit differently, we all got to be a little lazy in the Clinton years although that set up the sort of neoliberal apparatus, which is exactly and there's nothing that either Clinton or Obama did to undo a state apparatus who could be easily and so violently repressive by a neo-fascist. So I'm just wondering about the way we talk about activism or RMLAs and how it feels a little bit different generationally, I guess at this particular moment. I also saw Safety Net and I have a comment so if anybody doesn't want to hear it, cover your ears. But there's a young Jean that wrote a character that's like Sue Jean Kim and she tries to solve the class problem and essentially makes a fool of herself and exposes all of her prejudices and screams at everybody and she's crying and gets the police involved and then she has to leave and she comes back in to scream at them like you're not doing anything, I'm not doing anything, but at least I know I'm not doing anything. And it's to two women of color which I think is really interesting. I was talking to a friend about it feels similar to the end of Straightway Men with this helplessness but in this play she's kind of turned it to look at the questions of can you escape a system even if you're being oppressed by it, does your success ultimately mean you're just participating further in it in a way that I thought was really scary and I mean it's a rough draft but it definitely was something that shows it really raises this question of how do we escape these systems that we think can an individual escape a system that they live in or is it what it would require for massive change which I feel like Straightway Men is trying to deal with in this similar way of what is the individual responsibility towards change. Right, I mean she always says that she's the biggest straight white man of them all so she's always interrogating her own entrepreneurialism as whether or not she writes that character as an Asian female white male I think so again I just I thought that I think there's some really interesting things about resisting entrepreneurialism but again like that feels like a very different problem than the one we're in now and I do think we have to deal with white working class and middle class rage and I guess as someone like a mix a person of mixed cultural heritage in my family too and I've been trying to work through generationally like why would my sort of like working class white mother never have voted for Trump even though she would have been economically victimized in the way that many people who voted for Trump are and I've just been trying to work through why she would have never made that choice and why people are now making that choice and I think the thing that's scary is political choices are being made by younger generations like if I only saw like 80 year olds voting for Trump or marching in the streets I'd be like those people they're gone in 10 years gonna be fine gosh they're really trying to hold on to something that's like clearly gone and we're all gonna be okay which I think was this like faux optimism of the Obama era right but when I see 20 year olds doing it and like maybe they're not in my class I'm sort of like well why are they in my class because the first thing people said well those are just the ignorant people I'm like well they're the ignorant people who are enrolled in college classes which we can talk about education and ignorance in much more complicated ways than that but like those are kids going to college so why are we trying to cover up college educated white grievance um yeah yeah so it's funny that you bring up who's in your class and who's not because I've been thinking about that ever since being part of your class I remember there not really being any maps in the room most of the time not that I can remember so clearly they weren't talking but that the rest of my college experience is this constant struggle against like speaking as assertively and as confidently about my own opinions as the map in the room so I wonder like when you are in a mixed classroom like people who maybe feel like they don't have like access to something that you're speaking about because it doesn't conform with their personal experience or when you have people in that same room who are like this is the first time my personal experience has been addressed in the classroom setting in my entire life like how do you teach those students in the same room with like an equal amount of consideration or how do you negotiate the differences in your classroom which I had the problem more like I have to be really honest like I think I mean with a lot of compassion right because you're going to have people come and have these moments of revelation about race that are like sometimes horrific and I've had it happen in the classroom and like my game face is like totally better than I was 15 years ago like it really had to like learn how to like not be shocked in my face because that'll turn people off instantly and so you know I did have a student once ask this is I was once talking about I was talking about Uncle Thomas Cabin you were in the class but this wasn't your class I don't think and someone said well and someone said well I said well this legacy of calling a servant boy goes back to the infantilization of black men that has a legacy of slavery and so it's just going through the whole genealogy of that term and I had someone raise her hand and say well what would you call your servant then right and I mean I shouldn't even meet this being a live stream so I shouldn't even tell the story but I was like and I sat there and I was like okay and so I you know explain well I think you would call them by their name first or last depending on they're your employees right and people I work with who work with me like I called them by their name so I think you should just call them by their name actually but you know I mean that person never thought of that as a labor relation in that way right so but I don't know the jakes and the mats problem is something that's kind of interesting and I think it's about who's being admitted as much as people self-selecting out of a classroom taught by someone with a Spanish surname and an arts department known to be kind of liberal right I think it's about that they're not coming to Brown and what's interesting is like these are the people who fall in the middle who would get some financial later not but not enough but get a better package potentially somewhere else or find it more affordable to go to a state college so like the mats and jakes become jokes because you're not having to see them as humans in your classroom and right now I mean Brown and a lot of other elite institutions are trying to get rid of loans as part of student aid packages and I wonder what that's going to do and we've had very overt conversations at Brown about this sort of middle-class drop problem and how you get people from really different times of the economic spectrum so people who need full financial aid packages and people who are like going to name a building right and but you don't get it like there's like there's this whole set of people right that aren't coming because you have these both spectrums and then weirdly although their experiences are very different like sometimes their political sensibilities are the same right it's very odd but it's an interesting interesting problem I wonder if you could talk I don't know I saw it when I was at the public but I don't know the new version at all so maybe the public version is a new version so I'm using that I'm using that as sort of a new version where they talk about the debt really really openly which wasn't true early on so the whole debt thing like that doesn't happen in the workshop or in the script but what did you want to ask I thought there was the one coming to Broadway was like yet a third version yeah and I'm not I don't have that I mean I'm not using that version but the debt thing becomes and there's like this really early moment where like the check has a sort of like erratic thing going on where they're there's an earlier moment where someone's going to give a check like a donation it gives like his son a donation to give it's not very apparent what it is in the play but there's this really moment where one of the stage hands like puts the check down and it's like Mark is this moment where you're really supposed to see the check right because that sets you up for like the end right but we had a lot of conversations between the first draft and the second draft about debt I wondered if you could talk more about Ibsen or the references to yeah the Christmas tree it's out of head of gobbler so right like they bring the Christmas tree and she's like a woman who doesn't know how to handle her money and so she brings in this Christmas tree so like there's an Ibsen and debt is so important in Ibsen right like it's not always monetary debt but like debt is usually like the the device right that sets up all the other relationships in the play so she's clearly dealing with Ibsen and in the earlier version of this idea I think she's also dealing with death of a salesman like pretty overtly so like she's playing with all these like straight white male dramaturgies again that seems really quaint now to be like I was so obsessed with the debt I don't know people weren't screaming I will I will not be replaced in the streets I will not be replaced by Jews they were not you know anyway that was a different moment I wasn't always there but it was different Well with that Thank you Applauding