‘What to Send Up When It Goes Down’ — the catharsis we didn’t know we needed

On June 16, 1944, in South Carolina, George Stinney was wrongfully put to death — at the age of 14. On Aug. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and murdered before his body was sunk in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River.

These are some of the historical incidents of white violence inflicted upon the Black community. Violence that Black folks have been told to get over, even as it continues to permeate society in the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others.

It’s this violence Aleshea B. Harris highlights in her play “What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” which received its Chicago premiere Thursday night by Congo Square Theatre Company at the GRAY Chicago gallery in conjunction with the Rebuild Foundation.

With poetic monologues, breathtaking songs and several calls and responses, the production draws attention to pervasive violence against Black bodies in America. Directed by Daniel Bryant and Ericka Ratcliff, the show is meant for Black people, “though all are welcome.” Through a phenomenal all-Black cast, that promise is kept.

The evening’s participatory experience begins with the audience and cast gathered in a circle. We shared our names and honored 31-year-old Glenn Foster Jr., a former New Orleans Saints football player who died in police custody on Dec. 6, 2021. We said his name 31 times—once for each year of his life.

Soon, through questions posed by the cast, the audience is asked to share life experiences: Has anyone ever seen someone denied healthcare, promotion, a chance to speak because they’re Black? (Almost everyone stepped forward.) Have YOU ever been denied something because you’re Black? (Many, including myself, stepped forward).

It’s a heavy place to start, transitioned by a song — and a warning from cast member Anthony Irons: “The People are coming because it is the day after or the day before it has gone down. You know what I mean by ‘it,’ right? ‘It’ equals some terrible thing, some ‘bang-bang’ thing, some wrong color thing.”

John R. Boehm

We see “it” happen in the repetition of the “play within a play,” the first of several vignettes.

The only props are a chair for the maid (McKenzie Chinn) — that’s “M-A-D-E” because she’s a self-made woman; a hat and handkerchief for “Miss” (Penelope Walker), the white lady who employs Made; and a driver’s hat for “Man” (Ronald L. Conner) who is desperately seeking validation from Miss.

Miss thinks she’s God’s gift to Black people. She employs them, gives them reason to exist. But, like so many white saviors, she’s oblivious to the harm she causes even as she repeats, “My hands are clean.”

It’s Made who shows the frustration of being Black in a world that expects you to bow to your oppressors, act as if you have no life outside the expectations of white people.

It’s Man who reminds us how easily we can be forced into the margin, forgotten, unless we have something to offer to the white masses — something we see as Man is nearly dragged away from Miss by an invisible force, until she thinks of some utilitarian purpose he could serve.

John R. Boehm

For the duration of the 90-minute performance, vignettes blend together; different stories depicting experiences whites heave upon Black folks every day.

Like Jos N. Banks and Alexandria Moorman’s characters discussing Moorman’s coworker “non-racistly” saying, “I don’t see color.” Or Victor Musoni’s character slicing a large Y on his chest, the way a coroner does to a cadaver, “each time a Black civilian is killed.” And Conner trying to tell Irons the proper way to walk in a white neighborhood.

It could be easy to get lost as scenes switch between storylines. The key is to remember it’s not supposed to be linear: These events are what Black folks deal with every day.

Sometimes it’s funny, like hearing Moorman say she “politely leaned forward” and snatched her coworker’s mouth “off his face” and is keeping it in her purse like “a little fish flopping around.”

There’s also sorrow when Musoni frantically runs, screaming he’s being followed, and now there’s fresh blood on him, and it’s not his, but they’re coming closer and . . .

BANG!

We see him drop, and silence fills the theater.

John R. Boehm

No one moves. No one talks.

But you could hear someone in the audience sobbing. My own tears fell silently.

“What to Send Up When It Goes Down” is a cathartic journey through the pain of living as a Black person in an anti-Black society. It depicts our frustrations, our angers, our fears, the ways we deal with them. It also shows the ways we keep fighting and laughing and living in spite of it all.

As an audience, we screamed together, laughed together, cried together. And we knew we were not alone.

And I would do it all over again.