The Great Khan
Playwright Michael Gene Sullivan has said that “this play does not have a traditional villain.” (Mind you, there are bad guys involved: the play’s story is set in motion when a group of young men attempt to rape Ant, a girl who was a friend of theirs, up until the day she "got titties" and so became a target. Their attempt is foiled by our protagonist Jayden — a gamer at heart, a stinky teen boy in body — but by the time the play opens, fear of violent repercussions has led his mother to move him to a new, considerably less Black school in a new part of town.) The real villain, according to the program, is “the racist society that births stereotypes…which lead to a flattened expectation of people.” But it’s a tricky business, writing a play about racism without any racists or racist acts (unless you’re going to count the white history teacher who can’t manage to name 20 famous Black people who aren’t athletes or entertainers). It can wind up getting pretty speechy — which is not to say preachy, since Sullivan is a good enough writer to make his monologues sound like genuine cries from the heart, and the show’s polished and engaging cast can put that across — and those speeches can work to turn the play from a consideration of characters to an argument about History. What parts of whose history gets told, and who gets to tell it? Worthwhile questions, but perhaps a trifle academic, which is probably why the play’s action centers around a presentation for a high school history class. It helps some that one of the characters is himself historical: the Mongol Temujin, who eventually became Genghis Khan. The Great Khan, who lost his family, who was enslaved as a boy, who loved what was his own, and who slaughtered his enemies on the way to conquering more land than anyone else ever. An attractive character to a boy living in fear. But that part gets tricky as well: Sullivan is canny enough to have one character compare Temujin to Hitler — a man who rallied a suffering people to take vengeance on the world — but his defense…well, perhaps viewers ought to judge for themselves. Drama-wise, it’s worth noting that the characters themselves are spared a reckoning, even as the audience is threatened with one.
When
Ongoing until Sunday, March 27, 2022
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm & 7pm |
| Fridays, 8pm |
| Saturdays, 8pm |