Baltimore doesn't have the same kinds of racial dynamics that they have in a place like New York City. Here, everything is a black-white issue, a problem or a success that occurs between a minority and a majority. New York-based writer and director David Lamb's experiences led him to different insights about life and race.
"New York City is unique in the country in that the Black and Puerto Rican populations are very integrated," he said over the phone this week to the News-Letter,"moreso than anywhere in the country." In a conversation frequently interrupted by his commentary on the basketball game he was watching on TV, Lamb explained that the high school he went to was 50 percent black, 50 percent Puerto Rican.
When he went on to study at Hunter College, also in New York, he spent a semester doing an internship for Jose Serrano, a New York state assemblyman. Serrano was a member of the lobbying group known as the Black and Puerto Rican Legislative Caucus, and Lamb's work in this atmosphere raised questions in his mind about the challenges that face the two communities. "I kept wondering why is it that these two communities can dance at a party together but have a difficult time taking care of business together, politically."
In 1995, Lamb published the novel Do Platanos Go Wit' Collard Greens?, a story of Black-Puerto Rican relations told in the context of college life. Over the last two years, he has been working the novel into a version for the stage. The resulting play, Platanos and Collard Greens, has toured over fifty college campuses since it opened in New York. It comes to Hopkins' Arellano Theater tonight, thanks to Ole and the Black Student Union.
The story of Platanos and Collard Greens focuses on Freeman, a Black college student, and his girlfriend Angelita, a Dominican. Freeman is running for student council president, and there are tensions caused by members of both the Black and Latino communities who object to their relationship. Angelita's mother, in particular, is vehemently opposed to their dating, and Freeman's running mate, an African-American girl, keeps bringing up tough questions about his love life.
"It's what we call a 'romantic dramady,'" said Lamb. "It will make you laugh, it will make you angry, and it will make you think. It looks at stereotypes in a funny way, then analyzes them seriously." The play has been praised as extremely funny, and Lamb says that often Black and Latino audience members tell him that they identify very closely with the characters and the lifestyle portrayed on stage.
But at the same time, the work comments on a very serious set of problems in minority communities. "Even though these two groups live in close quarters and have tremendous influence on each other, often times they continue to see each other through the lens of white supremacy," said Lamb, "because both groups are still living under the influences of slavery and colonialism."
The novel that spawned Platanos and Collard Greens is credited as one of the first examples of "hip-hop fiction," a genre that incorporates the verbal aesthetics of rap music and African-American street language into standard long-form narratives. The play uses the same writing techniques, and even takes them a step further by making them essential to the staging of the work.
"There is a certain type of urban poetry incorporated as part and parcel of the story, in the references that the characters make and the discussions they have - it's a bit like what you would see in Def Poetry Jam," said the playwright. "And visually, there are some scene cuts that are similar to a deejay's cut." Several scenes take place around a circular table (used as a kitchen table, an office desk, and other props), and as the scenes change, the tabletop is shifted and maneuvered the same way a turntable is maneuvered when a deejay is scratching. "There are also poetry-slam like scenes," said Lamb.
The hip-hop element in Platanos and Collard Greens comes from Lamb's long-standing interest in hip-hop music and culture. He grew up in Queens' Astoria housing projects, the place, he jokes, where hip-hop began. After graduating from Hunter, he went on to study at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton, and later at NYU Law School. He now teaches at John Jay College in New York City. One of the courses he teaches is called "Society and Hip-Hop Culture," taught through the sociology department.
Because of its widespread success, Platanos and Collard Greens has become a regular fixture on college campuses, much in the same way Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues have become recurring events. Lamb says that both Black and Latino audiences have responded positively to the play. "They both love it greatly - they feel that it very much relates to their own experience, that it's very true to their lives, and that some of the things in it come straight from their own families, I've been told."
He hopes that college students who see the play will "take a step on their own" and set up more "Platanos and Collard Greens events." But at the same time, Lamb was careful not to make it seem as if his play has all the answers. In fact, he had a hard time timing thinking of even one solution that Platanos and Collard Greens offers to the problems of Black-Latino relations. "That's a dangerous position for an artist to put themselves in - the savior," he says. "It's really more something that I want to leave up to the audience.
Platanos and Collard Greens will be performed tonight, Thursday, April 7, at 7:00 p.m. in Arellano Theatre. Refreshments, including platanos and collard greens, will be provided directly afterwards in the Sherwood Room of Levering Hall.
