Fairview

With Act III, the play unravels further, becoming absurd as the four white spectators join the play onstage to take on the roles of Black characters who were previously only offstage. The act begins with Suze’s grand entrance as Mama, clad in a fancy dress described earlier in the play as Mama’s outfit for a long-ago birthday. With the introduction of the four white watchers as onstage characters, the relationship between Authenticity, Appearances, and Reality Checks is distorted. Aside from Keisha, who starts to see through appearances, the Frasiers accept the four white interlopers and everything that happens onstage as reality. Notably, the Frasiers themselves only exist as their characters, for even when the scene takes a turn toward to the metatheatrical, they remain themselves and do not reveal actors underneath their character roles. This impression is further supported when Keisha addresses the audience as herself. Thus, this stylistic choice endows the Frasiers with the highest level of authenticity, not only as characters but also as Black people, because no matter how many characters are layered onto these actors, their Black bodies are real and authentic on every level. They have the embodied, lived experience of Blackness. By contrast, the invasive white actors create a sense of dissonance because the real-life audience can clearly see that they are white even as the Black characters accept them as Black. Paradoxically, the white actors see themselves as more authentic than real Black people, further highlighting the inherent racism in The Voyeuristic White Gaze.

In Act III, Metatheatricality as Metaphor for the Performance of Race becomes a particularly prevalent theme. The infiltration of the four white watchers creates a new tier of performance, in which they have injected themselves into the narrative that they were meant to be watching. This shift serves as a metaphor for well-meaning or aggressive white people who infantilize BIPOC individuals and impose shallow stereotypes to dictate the framework of their lives. For example, Suze showcases her own racism when she extrapolates her childhood memories of her nanny, Mabel, in order to create an exaggerated version of Mama. Although Suze feels that she and Mabel had a close, mother-daughter relationship, she refuses to consider the fact that this perceived bond was part of Mabel’s job. When imposing her presence on the play, she tries to enact this same relationship on Keisha by inserting herself into Keisha’s asides to the audience and insisting that she knows and understands Keisha completely. Significantly, Keisha sees through her performance to catch a hint of the metatheatrical, and her skepticism emphasizes the fact that Suze does not belong there. When Bets enters, also dressed as Mama, she puts on an even more exaggerated performance of Black womanhood to replace Suze, who was asserting a connection to the family rather than performing a stereotype of Blackness. With the exception of Keisha, the Frasiers do not notice the extra grandmother. This subtle detail implies that the older generation is conditioned to accept what they see, but Keisha, who is young and bright and has an eye toward the future, starts to see the truth.

It is important to note that the four white spectators do not simply join the Black-centered narrative; they invade it. While Beverly and Jasmine’s brother Tyrone is an upstanding lawyer, when the character is suddenly played by Jimbo, he becomes a caricature of a stereotypical thug, speaking in unnatural and dated African American Vernacular English (AAVE). A lawyer with imminent prospects of becoming a partner in his firm would likely dress and act the part, but here, Jimbo clearly has a limited (and severely racist) idea of Black masculinity, and as the narrative of Act III contorts beneath the weight of the white characters’ misconceptions, Drury further highlights Metatheatricality as a Metaphor for the Performance of Race. For example, when Jimbo/Tyrone asks for a Colt 45, Beverly somehow unexpectedly finds one in the kitchen, despite the family’s tastes running to wine and bottled beer. Similarly, Mack plays Erika as a sassy drag queen and forces Keisha into the stereotypical role of a teen mother by simply giving her a pregnancy test, while Jimbo’s racist comments ruin the family’s finances and marriage in one fell swoop. As similar antics continue, it becomes clear that the white characters make their prejudices come alive merely by speaking them into being, and this dynamic also serves as a metaphor for racist narratives in real life. In this same vein, the white characters’ final act of destruction is the food fight. Food has been integral to the narrative throughout the play, emphasizing the Frasiers’ nature as a bonded family unit. For example, a lovingly cooked meal is Beverly’s way of honoring her mother on her birthday. This motif spins out of control in Act II, with the farcical stacking of fake food, and finally, the overt hostility of Act III completes the destruction of the meal as the white characters instigate the chaos of the food fight. After this moment, in which the white characters are the clear aggressors, the stage directions explicitly state that “something is actually broken” (98).

Because Suze takes on the role of Mama, she usurps the role of the guest of honor, implicitly claiming all of the family’s efforts to create the perfect party. All of the events of the play have been leading up to the moment of Mama’s entrance, and by taking over this role, Suze casts herself as a main character in the lives of this Black family. As she showers Keisha with overexaggerated affection, her implicit belief that she can help Black people to manage their lives and to succeed is beyond condescending, and she does not recognize that her behavior is very similar to Jimbo’s belief that he can teach Asian people how to live their lives. Thus, even as they enter the play—presumably to be watched—the four watchers still represent The Voyeuristic White Gaze. They have not come to work cooperatively with the family; instead, they have invaded this space in order to exert their will and impose their own simplistic experiences of Blackness. Just as Act III makes a farce of Mama’s honorary dinner by showing a white woman usurping the acclaim meant for a Black matriarch, Drury also implies that performances of Blackness are likewise shaped to entertain the white gaze, since theater audiences are usually overwhelmingly white. In Keisha’s final monologue, she addresses this issue by calling for a space outside the white gaze, referencing W. E. B. DuBois’s assertion that Black theater should be, “about us, by us, for us, only us” (105). She imagines a world in which the white gaze could be turned back on itself, creating a “fair view” (105), and she asks Suze/Mama to stop trying to tell her who she is. The play therefore asserts that there is no liberal agenda that can be imposed on Black communities for their own good; instead, white people need to stop imposing their gaze for the sake of Black self-determination.