WHOSE STORY IS IT ANYWAY?
Bang Bang, a brief review
Photo by Matt Popovich
The play Bang Bang, written and directed by Kat Sandler, depicts the aftereffects of a police shooting. Lila Hines, a rookie Black cop, shoots an unarmed Black teenager, and though he lives, the incident devastates Hines and destroys her career. A white playwright, Tim Bernbaum, decides to take her experience and adapt it into a play, without obtaining her permission or consulting her. Then, the play is picked to be adapted into a film, and upon learning that the lead actor wishes to consult with Hines, Bernbaum finally decides to pay Lila and her mother a visit. What follows is an explosive debate on who has the right to this story, an unfiltered treatment of topics like assumption, appropriation, racial tensions and the ethical limits of artistic freedom and representation.
The play – which ran Oct 2nd to 19th, 2019 at Winnipeg’s Tom Hendry Warehouse – brought up and discussed questions which are incredibly relevant to our current society. When it comes to issues of violence and oppression, who is allowed to tell these stories? What is the responsibility of the storyteller to the audience, and to the persons concerned? How can one practise responsibility when using artistic mediums to depict these difficult stories?
We live in an era of sensationalism and buzzwords, where news and viral videos are available at the tap of a screen. Police brutality against Black people has become such a commonplace act of injustice, most notably in the United States. So have mass shootings. One could argue that as we become more and more desensitized through what we see in the media, we forget that there are real people involved in these incidents of violence. This play reminds us that, as we take in so much content each day, we should perhaps pause and consider who is doing the storytelling, how it is portrayed, and perhaps to what ends.
This play is also a reminder of the care that must be taken not only in reporting but in writing about or portraying the hard-hitting social and political issues in our society. Who gets to tell someone’s story? Does it matter, so long as the story sends out an important message? Should certain people be restricted from portraying events that affect a community to which they do not belong? And does that story have to be told, even if the persons involved think otherwise? Does it matter that this play itself was written and directed by a white playwright? Bang Bang makes us pause to think about the power dynamics involved in telling any story, and to reflect on the ways in which the entertainment we consume might be appropriating other people’s struggles without necessarily showing the required respect or responsibility in addressing the issues or the persons concerned.
March 4, 2020