Sharr White’s Keynote Address

And thank you for the invitation to address this first-ever Capital-Region Festival of Theatre.

You should know that I’ve never given a keynote address before, so pardon me if I swing a little wild, here. And I promise you that I did do my best to find a playwright to speak who was actually famous, so I appreciate your patience.

And though the invitation to speak arrived in January, I’ll make no secret that I’ve struggled with what to say. After all, what does one speak of in unspeakable times?

These are days, when, still, I just need confirmation. That what is happening is actually happening. I think we all do. I almost feel like we can’t confirm it enough.

And for those of you who woke up this morning to read... pick a headline, any headline. (Right now, obviously, the news is being dominated by the president’s illegal military occupation of Los Angeles, and his deeply alarming — let’s just say it — hard-on of a military parade in Washington D.C., to say nothing of the unspeakable political assassinations in Minnesota.) But for those of you who woke up and wondered... is this actually happening? Be assured: It is. We are in an upside-down world.

At no time in our nation’s history has the “official” and the “policy” so drastically diverted from our very identity as a people.

Certainly there have been times in our history when we as a population, shamefully, were more aligned with policies that were ...vile. Dehumanizing. Let’s say it: violently racist. Blatantly white supremacist. I promise I didn’t come here today to go down the rabbit hole of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow.

But long ago now, people braver than us. Willing to risk more than us. Willing to risk life, limb, imprisonment, investigation, harassment... rang the bell of personhood and equality in this nation. Rang it loud and clear.

And we, sitting here today, have been raised, natively, within the reverberations from that sound. And what this president and his people are attempting to do is to convince us that we never, in the first place, heard that sound of freedom ringing.

Being raised Post-War, and Post Jim Crow, I never realized, until this moment, how deeply I thought of myself, somehow, in some intangible way as “good.” And I know that believing in American goodness is naive. I know that many countless evils have been undertaken in the name of American exceptionalism based on our identifying as “good.”

Still, I stand here feeling a deep loss. Because the nation in which I was raised delivered food assistance to starving children not just because our outpouring of midwestern grains helped regulate farm profits, and not just because bags of wheat stamped with the American flag was the single-most important tool of personal American diplomacy but because preventing children from starving to death was what Americans do.

The nation in which I was raised recognized that our system was a system that, yes, while dormant, could be frustratingly slow, choked by paperwork, strangled by regulation. But that was the dull price to be paid in order to have a system whose gears, in times of emergency, could throw off its boring Clark Kent exterior and roar to unstoppable life.

And yes. That system is maintained by the people Donald Trump is personally at war with: anybody who is driven by facts. And anyone who is driven to interpret, express, or perhaps counterintuitively, even rail against the world that those facts define.