”What`s This in My Coke?: Poetic Justice” isn`t, thankfully, as smugly undergraduate as its title, a reference to the famous pubic-hair item in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas testimony.
Now at the Live Bait Theatre, this straightforward, one-hour show features observations, reminiscences, debates and personal reflections on last October`s numbing, unprecedented television and testimony, a collage written by four Chicagoans and recited by performers who represent the four disparate corners of race and gender that the hearings subliminally set ablaze: a black man (Samuel L. Brooks), a black woman (Patrice Pitman), a white woman (Michele Fitzsimmons) and a white man (Jordan Teplitz).
The dramatists are Fitzsimmons, Barbara Kensey, Michael Warr and John Ragir. ”We all wanted to be pimps,” a young black complains and remembers. Later he says Thomas ”looked so unlike those criminals in `New Jack City,`
more like the criminals of Washington, D.C.” Nice white girls who went slightly sleazy take a different tack: ”Anita was a good girl, she did all she was supposed to. At 24, she was a Class A lawyer on Capitol Hill. I was a Playboy bunny.”
Later that same speaker confesses that while waiting tables she was subjected to verbal harassment by a drunk and didn`t talk back. ”I needed the job.” She wonders why, with so much more to lose, should Hill have spoken up. Even more poignant are Pitman`s haunting, funny accounts of growing up a black woman, schooled in solidarity only to find Hill and Thomas slugging it out on TV.
Imagistic instead of definitive, ”Coke” brushes on a wealth of debate topics on the issue, and with humor and anger reopens some barely healed wounds. If there`s a judgment, it`s that the great sin of the time was in the judgmental posturing of the whole nation; ”Coke” catalogs the shrugging views of ordinary people watching the famous making fools of themselves.
Informally delivered by a leisurely, almost amateurish cast, ”Coke”-a modest series of uncensored letters to the editor-ends with an especially searing note condemning Thomas` inflammatory use of lynching as a metaphor for his travails. Earlier someone sums up his senatorial interrogators: ”They struck me as a pretty lecherous bunch themselves.”
`WHAT`S THIS IN MY COKE?: POETIC JUSTICE`
Reflections in poetry, monologue and dialogue on the testimony of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. Playing at Live Bait Theatre, 3914 N. Clark St., at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday. Length of performance: 1:05. Phone 312-871-1212.
