There are flaws in Ragtime, as there are in everything from Macbeth to West Side Story, but I would like someone of color to either point out specifically what about Ahrens’s work on the show troubles them so much, or to point to a song or stanza that they would have been embarrassed to have written and/or think that a black writer would never have written that way.
(Let us not forget that not only was the book writer of Ragtime white, Terrence McNally, but so was the original author of the novel it’s based on, EL Doctorow, as well as the playwright/screenwriter who wrote the film adaptation, Michael Weller.... so not only is Ahrens in solid company dramatizing this work, but with dozens of white characters on the stage and only 3, arguably 4, main black characters - admittedly very crucial - it’s not like this is an August Wilson milieu, and there’s an argument to be made that it seems no more imperative for Ragtime to be written by black writers than it would for, say, South Pacific to be written by Tonkinese women.)
We can’t begin to learn where other groups or individuals are coming from if they toss off colloquial catch-phrases that seem to lump all people of a different group under the burden of a different monolith, and without educating us or being specific as to why they feel that way about them. |
