52 pages • 1 hour read
Jackie Sibblies DruryFairview
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions and discussions of racism, race, and Black racial stereotypes. This guide quotes and obscures the source text’s use of the n-word.
The stage directions read, “Lights up on a negro” (7). Beverly, a Black woman, is peeling real carrots as she sings and dances to music that comes through a speaker. She examines her reflection in an imaginary mirror on the fourth wall. Dayton, her husband, enters and checks her appearance as well, startling her. Beverly chides Dayton but lets him distract her briefly with a kiss before returning anxiously to the task of preparing a birthday dinner for her mother, Mama. Dayton has brought the barest minimum of six place settings of silverware, and Beverly reproaches him at first and then accepts it. As Beverly plots out the seating, Dayton resists the idea of Mama sitting at the head of the table in his house, and he is displeased to learn that Beverly’s sister, Jasmine, is joining them. Beverly replies, “She’s family. And family is everything” (10).
Dayton exits, and Beverly calls after him, asking him for the root vegetables he was directed to buy. The doorbell rings, heightening Beverly’s anxious activity. She quickly hides a beer bottle that Dayton left on the coffee table. Dayton reenters with a cheese plate and reassures Beverly, who returns to the kitchen. At the door, Dayton greets Jasmine, who bears flowers and a bottle of rosé. Jasmine directs him to put the wine in the freezer, and when he offers her the cheese plate, she exclaims that she no longer eats dairy and shows off her physique. Behind Jasmine, Dayton mimics her, abruptly covering her when she turns around. He exits, and Jasmine looks at herself in the invisible mirror on the fourth wall. Alone in the living room, Jasmine sneaks a bite from the cheese plate, but Beverly calls out that she “better not be eating that cheese!” (12). Jasmine spits the cheese out and finds a place on the set to hide it.
Beverly enters, complaining about Jasmine’s new dietary restrictions. Jasmine retorts that she just wants to celebrate Mama and opines that it is silly for Beverly to make a fuss over cheap brie. Mama is upstairs, and Jasmine wants to say hello, but Beverly stops her. Jasmine questions Beverly’s nervousness, suggesting a glass of the rosé she brought, which is in the fridge rather than the freezer. Beverly exits, and Jasmine returns sneakily to the cheese plate. Keisha—Beverly and Dayton’s teenage daughter—enters, startling Jasmine. Jasmine and Keisha perform their “special Auntie-Niece greeting” (15). In an endless run-on sentence, Keisha complains about her non-specified sports practice. Then, she asks Jasmine to help her convince Beverly to allow her to take a gap year before college. Keisha is an overachiever who plays multiple varsity sports, takes a litany of Advanced Placement classes and extracurriculars, but she is exhausted in her soul. Jasmine agrees to try.
Keisha exits to shower, and Beverly returns with three glasses of wine, missing Keisha and complaining that she needs her daughter’s help with the pie. Beverly rejects Jasmine’s offer of help, and when Jasmine starts to mention the gap year idea, Beverly rejects this immediately and sends Jasmine to take the third glass to Mama. Jasmine exits. The phone rings, and Beverly speaks to her brother, Tyrone. She is upset to learn that his flight will be very late. She reproaches him for cutting it so close due to work, as if there are no other lawyers at his firm. Dayton enters, and Beverly grumbles that Tyrone might miss dinner and never puts his family before work. Dayton reassures her. Beverly asks Dayton for the root vegetables she asked him to buy. He teases her, pretending to have found root vegetables too confusing. Beverly gives an indignant monologue, and then Dayton produces the vegetables. Beverly replies, “One day, I will kill you” (20). The oven timer goes off, and Beverly sends Dayton to the kitchen with specific directions for the short ribs while she peels the root vegetables.
A door slams offstage, and Jasmine speaks to Mama through the door, quickly giving up and reentering. Mama has locked herself in her bathroom, although Jasmine insists that she didn’t provoke her. Beverly worries about whether Mama will like her birthday dinner, and Jasmine reassures her that Mama is being dramatic as usual and will join them as soon as she senses that no one is talking about her. Jasmine asserts that the whole family is dramatic, as if they are in a movie. Beverly disagrees, but Jasmine doesn’t want to argue. Jasmine monologues to herself, irked at Beverly’s criticism but determining that Beverly acts this way because “her man don’t love her right” (24). Jasmine concludes that Dayton does not move properly. Jasmine asks Beverly if Dayton is ill, which he isn’t. She tries to talk about Beverly and Dayton’s sex life, but Beverly ends that conversation topic. Keisha reenters, showered, and does a dance to convey that she is clean and hungry. Jasmine comments that Keisha is like Mama, who also has a dance for everything.
They remember Mama in her younger years, dressed for her birthday in a regal ivory gown, singing and performing her birthday dance. Dayton enters and recognizes the dance immediately. In a soliloquy, Keisha expresses happiness about her bright future and her love for her mother and aunt, but she admits that something is blocking her potential—something that “thinks that it has made me who I am” (27). The phone rings, and it’s for Keisha. She exits. Beverly frets to Dayton about whether everything is perfect. Keisha returns and explains that her friend Erika needs to drop something off for her. Beverly exclaims that Mama doesn’t like Erika and how Keisha acts with her; Keisha denies this accusation. Beverly sends Keisha to check on the cake. Dayton and Jasmine try to make Beverly sit down instead of returning to her carrots. Keisha reports that the cake has burned. Beverly panics even though Dayton promises to buy a cake. Beverly faints, dropping the carrots, and everyone gathers around her.
Act I Analysis
The primary purpose of the first act is to follow all the usual conventions of theater in order to lull the real-life audience into a false sense of security and normalcy by implying that this production is yet another example of predictably realistic storytelling. Act I therefore strictly fulfills the roles of the first act in a traditional three-act play structure by laying out the exposition and introducing the characters and primary conflicts. The exposition in Fairview’s first act reveals that the play centers on the Frasiers, an upper-middle-class Black family. Pointedly, none of the family’s conflicts have anything to do with their racial heritage. Instead, each issue is quite run-of-the-mill and could be portrayed by a cast of any racial background. For example, Beverly is anxiously determined that the impending birthday party for Mama must be perfect, and she is frustrated by the less-than-helpful antics of her husband, Dayton, and her sister, Jasmine. Additionally, her overachieving daughter Keisha is trying to convince her mother to let her take a gap year before college. Thus, all three of these characters are poised to complicate Beverly’s party preparations. Also, in accordance with theatrical conventions, the act ends with the inciting incident, in which Beverly faints, overcome with stress upon learning that the cake has burned.
At the end of the act, Beverly’s fainting creates a cliffhanger that tacitly promises a continuation of the action in accordance with the Aristotelian plot structure, in which the rising action leads inevitably to a climax and ends in a denouement. As a rule, audiences are trained to expect verisimilitude and to willingly suspend their disbelief and accept the play’s events as realistic within the production’s self-defined parameters. Theatrical conventions also teach audiences to accept some minor transgressions against the depiction of reality, such as asides to the audience; soliloquys, or asides to oneself; or the unrealistic passage of time. For example, when Keisha or Jasmine break the fourth wall—the invisible wall of the house that separates the stage from the audience—or when Keisha returns from showering much too quickly but not so quickly as to be ridiculous, typical audiences agree to suspend their disbelief and accept these moments as realistic, and Drury relies upon the widespread acceptance of these conventions even as her play increasingly blurs the lines between Authenticity, Appearances, and Reality Checks during the second and third acts.
However, in Act I, Drury uses Beverly’s angst-ridden carrot-peeling and banter with her husband to imply that the play is no more than a family comedy. With this preconceived notion influencing audience perceptions, Drury intensifies the scene’s promise of zaniness as Beverly worries about appearances while the rest of the family falls short of her expectations in humorous ways. Thus, during the first act, Drury creates a situation that openly invites audiences to do what audiences do best: sit in the darkness and observe, laughing and reacting to the play even as they maintain the vast gulf between spectators and spectacle. Significantly, Drury is also operating on the assumption that the audiences comprising most major and minor theater communities are white, and as Acts II and III begin, she will create a stinging critique of the fact that white audiences actively consume Black art, Black narratives, and Black voices. The narrative of the play is highly self-conscious, for Drury is aware that white audience members have paid for a ticket to a play by a prominent, up-and-coming Black playwright. As a result, her play will endeavor to force the audience itself to become a character in the drama. However, for the moment, Drury merely draws upon the fact that any white audience members are sitting in the dark in their expensive seats and are passively watching the Black family onstage, comfortably taking on the role of The Voyeuristic White Gaze. From the perspective of such voyeurs, audiences are not required to think critically about themselves or to consider the weight of the white gaze and recognize how much it shapes what it watches. Voyeurism is a one-way mirror, much like the unseen mirror that hangs invisibly on the Frasiers’ fourth wall. Even the asides spoken directly to the audience exist as manufactured, faux addresses that do not yet require any real participation, self-reflection, or conversation.
While the first act does follow convention closely, it also includes key moments in which the façade of normalcy peels up at the corners in metatheatrical ways. This approach also acts as a necessary counterpart to The Voyeuristic White Gaze, and this interplay can be seen in the playwright manner of address to the actors and director in her stage direction. For example, the play’s opening note statement of “Lights up on a negro” (7) starts a backstage dialogue that comments upon how the first act is meant to function, exploring Metatheatricality as a Metaphor for the Performance of Race. The play also gives small hints to the audience that foreshadow the ways in which Drury will further employ metatheatricality in Acts II and III. For example, at the beginning of Act I, as Beverly dances while she cooks, the music glitches, momentarily shattering the sense of verisimilitude. Additionally, although the carrots are real, much of the action in Act I has a manic edge that sometimes spins into absurdity. Notably, although the Frasiers are a Black family, their central conflict and action has nothing to do with race, and the humorous foibles and missteps of their efforts to create the perfect birthday dinner reflect a common sitcom trope that works with characters of any race. The audience is therefore encouraged to laugh and identify with the characters and their relatable problems. Thus, this “safe” and mundane performance of Blackness is constructed in such a way as to be palatable and entertaining to white audiences, and the characters’ Blackness in Act I affirms not only the audience’s whiteness but also their white benevolence—a form of prejudice that reinforces racial hierarchies and the widespread acceptance of institutional racism.
