The Museum of Contemporary Art hosted a 50-minute performance of Edgar Arceneaux’s Until, Until, Until… for three performances in October. The LA-based writer/director/producer/performer devised the production 10 years ago to remember, revisit and reinterpret a 1981 performance for Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Reagan was the first president to coin the coded racist phrase “Let’s Make America Great Again,” a sentiment making a comeback in our current election season.
Legendary actor Ben Vereen, lauded onstage as the Leading Player in the original Broadway production of Pippin (1973 Best Musical Actor Tony Award) and on television for his performance of Chicken George in the groundbreaking series Roots (1977 Emmy nomination), created an homage performance about noted vaudevillian Bert Williams. He was an early mainstream African American performer who had to wear blackface, “corking out,” despite already being Black, a racist requirement in early 20th century revues.
Vereen planned his Williams tribute in two parts. The first was a recreation of Williams’ vaudevillian song-and-dance routine to the ragtime song “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” The second half was Vereen wiping off his blackface while singing Williams’ “Nobody,” which included lyrics like “When life seems full of clouds and rain / And I am full of nothin' and pain / Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain? / Nobody.” (Fellow silent era star W.C. Fields had called Williams “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest.”)
Part two explores how white supremacy dictated white norms such as Black people wearing blackface, and how African Americans were forced to “wear the mask,” as poet Paul Dunbar considered in 1895:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
The live audience at the time saw both parts of Vereen’s act, but the televised viewers did not see the second half of the performance as promised by ABC TV, only the minstrelsy of the premiere part, followed by a performance from the relentlessly cheerful Marie Osmond (played here by Jes Dugger). Afterward, national Black audiences shunned Vereen for years thinking that he offered a stereotypically submissive performance for a predominantly white, Republican crowd.
“I was a little nervous,” Vereen said. “I was performing for the president. I was nervous but overall, I felt like it went, I thought that it went, well. Everyone was congratulating me when I left the stage. Two days later, my conductor said to me, ‘Brace yourself.’” Vereen would then experience what he had hoped to expose.
Arceneaux became obsessed with the story after watching clips. After a brief meeting, Vereen supported making the scandal into a performance piece to unspool the complete story. The result is a fluid, moody revisitation where Arceneaux intersperses dance warmups and snippets of speech with archival video of Vereen’s performance and cultural touchstones of the time like references to Star Wars, Nancy Reagan’s advice to “just say no” to severe drug addicts and Ronald Reagan’s lust for jellybeans.
The 2024 audience is invited to red-clothed round tables on the mainstage thrust to drink from the onstage bar and await the performance, much as original inaugural attendees did. An opaque curtain separated the audience from Vereen’s backstage dressing table, which is eventually drawn, and the audience is then invited to seats ringing the backstage area. This seating progression literally draws current audiences into the past, forcing their gaze (mixed race at the MCA) to navigate through the layers of racism in this saga.
The deviser seems to be asking are we participatory in the white gaze or just outside observers? All non-intervention stances are complicit in the othering of Williams, Vereen and Arceneaux (the three "until's..."), using many masks: blackface as a double mask, tuxedos and inauguration ball gowns disguising and distracting from white supremacy, and modern audiences silently obeying as they’re told what to do and where to go.
Like all African Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, Williams endured discrimination by businesses around where he performed, unable to eat or stay in the same places as his white audiences. “It wouldn’t be so bad,” he said, “if I didn’t hear the applause still ringing in my ears.”
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