America is Hard to See
February 2018
America is Hard to See
America is Hard to See. By Travis Russ, Life Jacket Theatre, Feb. 2018. Here Arts Centre, New York.
The year 2017 saw an overwhelming amount of women come forward as victims of sexual assault in what is being called the #metoo movement. It was a historical moment of female empowerment, and a clear shift of societal expectations, raising awareness of systemic sexual assault and claiming it as absolutely unacceptable. There is so much positive change happening because of this cultural movement, but a clear danger is to reduce a sex offender to nothing but a sub-human monster. America is Hard to See refuses to take that position as it tells the stories of registered sex offenders as they are released from prison and try to get their lives back together.
It opened with a hymn and spoke very openly about the grace that was extended to the men by a female pastor, and through her, by God as well. It told the stories of deeply hurting men who knew that they had caused a lot of pain for other people, and it did so with a reverence that spoke to me as a holy moment. This play was, as the title suggests, hard to see. It is easy to hate sex offenders, and to colour them as something less than human, but this production did not allow you to do that. It challenged our tendency to push people into categories and force them to be only one thing. A documentary play that was similar to Laramie Project, I really respected the actors that were willing to enter the lives of these characters, all of whom were based on real people and real situations.
The acting in this play was excellent. A performance that stood out to me personally was Ken Barnett, who played Chad, a conservative Christian teacher who struggled with homosexuality and had abused one of his students. He, like all of the other actors, waded bravely into the pain and confusion of a very real person and connected deeply with the audience. America is Hard to See gave me hope for the future of live theatre, and its ability to challenge convention and continue to bring about societal change.