The cast of “Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist” (Image courtesy of Fractal Theatre Collective)

If the title of Fractal Theatre Collective’s debut show Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist sounds like blatant provocation, that’s not an accident. The show’s writer/director Andrew Watring is well aware of its confrontational implications.

“Seeing that reaction of people saying, ‘hey, you can’t say that about Shakespeare’? That was the most interesting thing,” Watring says, recalling the original production of this play last winter by American University’s Rude Mechanicals company.

The play follows a group of actors of color as they audition for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along the way exploring the singular plight performers of color experience in the arts. Watring was inspired to create the show after seeing a one-woman performance by AU alum Manna Middlebrooks titled Something About Being Invisible. At one point in that show, Middlebrooks, engaging the audience directly, asked what Watring was doing for people of color at the university.

Realizing the answer was “not enough,” Watring set about writing this show, adapted from conversations with collaborators about their shared experiences as performers of color. But while theater specifically forms the focus for the show, the insight on display stretches beyond the stage, peering through to the everyday racial superstructures that inform the experiences within the arts space. As the flagship production for the brand-new Fractal Theatre Collective, of which Watring is artistic director, it exemplifies the company’s goal of making theater a more inclusive and welcoming space, both for artists and audiences.

“The experiences people of color have in theater are so intrinsically connected to the barriers encountered in being a person of color in life,” Watring explains. “One of the first questions I asked was, ‘Do you think people of color have to work harder?’ And everyone I spoke with responded an emphatic ‘yes.’ Of course! Our stories aren’t immediately respected. They aren’t given that sort of immediate value attached to them.”

In the play, Shakespeare as an institution is a stand-in for the entire Western canon, a towering establishment that modern performers of color find themselves struggling with. By situating a frank and probing conversation about race and representation as interactions with Shakespeare’s texts, Watring hopes to create a dialogue with the audience that highlights the internal conflicts these performers experience on a daily basis.

Watring highlights a specific monologue in the show, in which one of the main characters who is auditioning, Macbeth (all of the characters have names from the Bard’s works) expresses a cyclone of emotions any black man in America can identify with. In the scene, Macbeth grapples with whether or not to perform Othello, a role black men are often pigeonholed into, despite its reinforcement of problematic stereotypes regarding rage and interracial relationships.

But it goes further than the proscenium. In the monologue, Macbeth expresses a wish that he’s unable to breathe, because then his chest wouldn’t expand and he couldn’t be misconstrued as an aggressor. He talks about wanting to suck into his own body, to not exist as a threatening voice or presence.

It’s heavy subject matter to be sure, and using a beloved figure like Shakespeare as the framework proved divisive during the initial production of the show. Watring says their posters were ripped off the walls on AU’s campus and they received harsh messages on social media. But this time around, perhaps due to a changing sociopolitical climate, feedback has been less antagonistic. Watring wonders whether audiences are more open to such a dialogue further on in the Trump era, where he says self criticism isn’t such a foreign concept for progressives.

“The show really holds passivity and allyship to the flame,” he says. But perhaps in the production’s talkback sessions and its purposefully uneasy ending, an audience member might come away inspired to action, just as Watring was when Manna Middlebrooks asked that fateful question.

Shakespeare is a White Supremacist runs August 2-11 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 7th Street SE. $15. Pay-what-you-can nights August 2 and 8. Tickets are available here.