World Stage Theatre Company: “Reflections”
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
October 26, 2023
Over a hundred years later, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre continues to impact this city’s community life. The worst act of racial violence in the nation’s history is still present here, despite the efforts of some to “leave it in the past.” Reflections—a triumph of an original play first produced in 2020 and revived last month by World Stage Theatre Company—used theatre’s unmatched ability to help us witness ourselves to deliver a forthright look at realities of race in Tulsa’s past and present, as well as a challenge to walk with agency, hope, and determination toward a better future.
Written by Tulsans Obum Ukabam (who also directed) and Bailey James, Reflections opened with a stark image. On one side of the stage, residents of Greenwood in 1921 anxiously assessed the crisis unfolding around them and strategized what to do about it. On the other, an all-white board met in the present day to discuss whether or not it was a good idea to teach the history of the massacre in schools. In quick cuts between the groups, we began to hear varying opinions within each—a pattern that ran throughout a play that invited us to enter introspectively and courageously into a range of experiences.
Ukabam and James skillfully carried the audience (one of the most diverse and enthusiastic I’ve ever seen in a Tulsa theater) between the Greenwood of 1921 and the present, as keenly observed contemporary scenes—a Black man and a white woman announcing their engagement to their mothers, a white newsroom boss looking to a Black writer to generate clicks on a story about police brutality, a Black family’s celebration of a high school graduation—interwove with episodes from the devastating days and nights of the massacre.
Each scene was a play in itself, full of unexpected twists and revelations. This multiplicity of stories within stories was nearly overwhelming, but it held the attention with clear-as-glass dialogue, laugh-from-the-gut humor, and visceral emotion. The play ended with a return to the opening tableaux, now deepened by what came before, as a teacher at the school board meeting laid out evidence of what really happened in the Drexel Building’s elevator on May 30, 1921, and survivors in a destroyed Greenwood placed one brick on top of another: a work of rebuilding that’s still going on.
As it turned from the past to the present and back again, Reflections pulled many fragments of reality together to help us look with both more clarity and more nuance at where Tulsa has been, where we are, and how we might go on. The strong cast of 38 Black and white actors played dual roles throughout the show, exponentially increasing the “reflections” within the play’s structure. One notable example showed a white milkman trying to lead two Black children to safety through Greenwood streets they knew better than he did. Chased by a white mob, he and one child escaped—the other child did not. The actor who portrayed the milkman also appeared as a speaker at the present-day school meeting, arguing for the importance of everyone being taught about the massacre. And the actor who played the captured boy (whose knowledge might have saved him, had the milkman listened) turned up in the graduation party as a young man who’d chosen a new nickname for himself: “Facts.”
Ukabam and James never took the easy way through these stories. Even evildoers had a human face, and riffs on stereotypes that provided comic relief deepened into character studies that asked us to think differently. One of the strongest scenes existed outside the two acts of the play, during the intermission. Behind barbed wire fencing that divided the stage from the seats, Black actors, as Greenwood residents corralled during the massacre, spoke directly to audience members. “You were just in my store last week,” one said to a white man in the front row; another reached out for help to a white woman leaving the theater to take a phone call.
Sometimes ferociously, sometimes hilariously, sometimes delicately, always provocatively, Reflections challenged all of us to see each other and ourselves in our shared past and present.
Addressing the audience before the show, the writers emphasized the image in the play’s title as they stood facing each other for a moment: a Black man and a white woman who, they explained, came together to try to tell a fuller, more usefully complicated, more human version of stories that involve all of us. They looked steadily at each other, and invited the audience to do the same not just with what came before us on the stage, but with our neighbors after we left the theater.
As this play ran in Tulsa, Killers of the Flower Moon opened across the nation, another welcome instance of giving voice to the ongoing impact of historic wrongs in Oklahoma. If reality feels difficult to look at, Reflections seemed to suggest, stay with it, and don’t turn away: we can’t move forward together without doing so.
