Subject of Inquiry

Subject of Inquiry Exploring Reed’s unique curriculum

Hands Up

Thirteen minutes is a long time to hold your hands above your head. And yet, that is exactly what the audience is asked to do in Hands Up: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments (2015), a play studied by my students in Theatre 207, Race and Identity in American Theatre.

The play was commissioned following the police shooting of a young, unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and the protests and violent police response that followed. It premiered in Portland in 2016, directed by Kevin Jones and produced by Portland’s Red Door Project. This image shows actor La’Tevin Alexander performing the final monologue of that play, asking the audience for “a showing of solidarity.” My students study plays like Hands Up to understand what we mean when we use the term “race,” and how performance can give us a unique lens through which to understand this social system.

In Hands Up, when the actor asks audience members to hold their hands in the air and keep them up for the entire monologue, he is asking the audience to bear witness to both the pain and the resilience of Black Americans in a context of white supremacy and institutional violence. But he is also asking the audience, both Black and non-Black, to engage across their differences in an embodied act of solidarity. “I’m asking you to be uncomfortable with me for a moment, for this moment in time, let’s attempt to experience the same experience together,” he implores.

—PROF. KATE DUFFLY [THEATRE 2012–]

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