Learned Helplessness - a play

AT RISE: Outside, the stage is bright, the sound of a train coming into the station is heard from the distance. There is brick that lines the backstage, an array of street lights can be observed overhead. There are 5 seats placed around the stage.

Centerstage is a man, skinny, brown, and long. His locks frame his face, he is beautiful but the look on his face - is contrite and ominous. Sitting in a chair to the right of him is another man, almost crumpled along the chair, slouched, hugging himself to protect himself from the cold wind of the fall day.

"DARNELL" the man in the center stands up slowly, brushes dirt off of his pants, for something to do rather than to actually remove the dirt from his pants, and begins. His voice is calculated and controlled… but rage lies very close underneath it all.

DARNELL: My mama told me I ain't shit, my father told me I ain't shit, the world - and everyone in it told me I ain't shit. So, am I to be blamed for my ain't shit ways and actions? I come from a place where the county don't recognize me for who I is - a king. From where on one corner you may find death and on the next… inspiration.

DARNELL: Where the taggers reign supreme, the pushers are the ones you want on your team, and where dreams can either die or survive by the skin of the dreamer's teeth. Or from the grasp of a wayward cop's gun.

(A police siren can be heard in the distance, and DARNELL quiets for a moment.)

DARNELL: Like any good Brooklyn boy, I knew church, as the way to find god. Found hope - in the pews of the various baptist churches, my aunties and uncles went to look for salvation. But you know, God seems irrelevant when your mama gives her last dollar to the tithe instead of buying food for her babies.

DARNELL: God seems less like holy and more like gangster. More like that bully on the corner you pay off with the couple quarters you got for lunch if only for one more day of salvation. Before you grow up and can beat said Bully until he is bloody in the face.

(The man in the chair towards the left rises.)

JOSEPH: I always thought it was kind of funny not funny haha but funny like the tears you cry after you finally catch up to Mr. Softy on a hot day in July. To have your prized, overpriced scoop of ice cream fall to the floor - and you famished and hot from the run. Think of scooping it back in your cone before the ants -

DARNELL: Get to the point, Joe!

JOSEPH: Well if you'd let me - I always thought it was funny how the elders in my family talked of their kids, that they called us lost and were surprised when we grew up empty and unremembered? How surprised they are - how deeply they cry when a cop from long island who ain't never seen my kind before - see me, and shoots until he sure I ain't just dead but that I vanished?

DARNELL & JOSEPH: Eric Garner…

DARNELL: Always found that funny you see not haha funny, but hehe… - the uncomfortable laughter that comes after a misused word, or a fart in any formal place. The awkwardness that accompanies a black man or woman who works a corporate job, puts on a tailored suit. And is reminded of how black he or she is when a white woman in said Elevator grabs her purse -

DARNELL: (Annoyed now.) JOE…

JOSEPH: Anyway… about jokes. I always thought it was strange this notion of apathy.

DARNELL: Apathy?

JOSEPH: That apathy my aunties swore belonged solely to my generation - that explains the so-called inaction of -

DARNELL & JOSEPH: Our generation.

JOSEPH: My Aunt Josey used to say it with such self-righteousness, such conviction. As if her generation were not the ones who were victims of the crack epidemic. As if that addiction, did not victimize its way into our collective bloodstream? As if…

DARNELL: They do not share some of the blame for this so-called inaction. This apathy of a generation that they -

JOSEPH: Mothered and fathered.

DARNELL: I do not quite have the words for this - it has to be deeper than just an unwillingness to move - to act. What you think we doing all night? What you think the parties, the drinks, the street chemists who knew how to roll the perfect joint when we were still tryna score loseys off the -

A young black woman, mid-20s, psychology student, rushes to the stage, ruffled and hurried. She slams her book bag on the ground and pulls out a textbook and begins reading.

DARNELL and JOSEPH look at her comically, as if she's just interrupted a very important meeting and not the musings of two men who have nowhere to be and no home to rush to after the sunsets.

(As if aware she is being watched she looks up at JOESEPH and DARNELL.)

LORAINE: Can I help you?

JOSEPH: You got a dollar?

LORAINE: Can't say that I do.

JOSEPH: How about 2?

LORAINE: All outta dollars I'm afraid.

JOSEPH: (JOSEPH clicks his tongue.) Then you can't help either of us at all.

(LORAINE rolls her eyes and pointedly continues to read her textbook.)

DARNELL walks up to her, a glint in his eyes and a smirk on his face. Playful.) DARNELL What are you? Some kind of student or something?

(LORAINE pointedly shows him her textbook, the textbook reads: ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY.) LORAINE: Or something.

DARNELL: OOOOOOOhhhh, Joseph, would you looky here… Psychology, we got a shrink in training here.

(DARNELL snatches the book and makes a small show of flipping through the pages. LORAINE stands up and snatches the book back from him indignantly.)

LORAINE: I think you could do with a little understanding of it.

(DARNELL laughs, it's not a chuckle but a deep and long belly laugh, the kind of laugh that makes you bend over. LORAINE and JOSEPH look on.)

LORAINE: You laughing at me?!

DARNELL: (Laughs.) I am laughing at your presumptuousness!

LORAINE: My presumptuousness -

DARNELL: Yes! Your assumption that I ain't have my own run-ins with the abnormal psyche of many! Black, educated, and respectable aren't ya? So quick to judge, both confident and so indignant in your judgment it seems.

LORAINE: Do not patronize me. I come from the same place as you, smoked the same crumbling weed, and stem, and all ate the same poisonous apple pie and drank the same bitter formula. Had the same opportunity -

DARNELL: (The rage rises subtly to the surface like him it is both controlled and calculated.) Op.por.tunity?

JOSEPH: (chidingly) Nell… DARNELL OP.POR.TUNITY? (DARNELL shifts his body so that he is squarely looking at LORRAINE.)

DARNELL: Do not mistake you and I as being the same, As being cut from the same wrung-out cloth. I can smell the certainty on you. Can tell you came from a mother who doted on ya and probably made you believe that you were her special girl. A father who still thinks no one will ever be good enough for his daughter am I right? So green, wet behind the ears, the scent of Similac still on your breath. Did you go to a private school?

JOSEPH: (Pleading, coaxing.) Nell…

DARNELL: Did you play every sport, were you in every club in high school? Probably the president of your college's black student union aren't you? Your idea of a good time is probably sitting around pontificating on the rights of black people - just from a respectable distance. You've got a boyfriend huh? A man who you fuck once a week, and who shows you off to his friends, Ivy League? You. You don't get to speak to me about opportunity while sucking on a silver spoon.

LORAINE: Are you done?

(DARNELL shrugs with a small smile, gesturing for her to speak.)

LORAINE: You got some things right. But like that mop of hair on your head that could use the deft hands of a loctician, and your ashy ass lips that seem to be in an ever-present disgustingly syrupy half-smile. You got most all the other things wrong. I came from a mother who with grit and ambition pursued higher education and a father who was around but not present. I spent most of my time in high school with my head down. And I don't quite like pontificating with anyone let alone uninformed, idiotic, condescending motherfuckers like you. I walk around feeling more like a bystander in my own life rather than an active participant. Does that scream Black Student Union president to you?

DARNELL: Well, I-

LORAINE: That was rhetorical, I am not done. My awareness, my consciousness was born by way of trauma. Did you know that black girls are more likely to experience sexual trauma before the age of 12, more than any other race of girls and women? Did you know that 4 out of 10 black women are likely to experience domestic violence in their lifetime?

LORAINE: (a beat) That by virtue of being a black woman, black women and girls are disproportionately likely to experience violence at home, walking to school, taking the bus, at work, by a police officer who decided to shoot them in their own home hours after playing video games with her nephew…

ALL: Atiana Jefferson.

LORAINE: Daddy has never been much a talking man, so that throws the possibility of caring and communicating out of the window. Never been one to fuck men. So, that throws the idea of an Ivy League boyfriend right on out that window too. Education - is but a means to an end, it is not just white folks who tend not to hear you if you do not have a degree or two connected to you, but so-called educable black folks too.

(The scene ends in a standstill, LORAINE, hard and indifferent staring at DARNELL and DARNELL smug and jovial.)