Abstract
Working from the premise that theatre and performance can yield valuable insights about the operations of race, this article explores the dramaturgical strategies Lydia R. Diamond deploys in her 2014 comedy, Smart People, to interrogate the complexities of racial politics in the twenty-first century. I trace how, through the intertwined narratives it weaves for its four protagonists, Smart People engages important debates about the rebiologization of race, the psychic costs of stereotyping, and the vexed representational politics of US theatre, thereby bringing into sharp relief the ways in which narratives of racial progress obscure the material ramifications of race in contemporary life. Even as it trades in the signs of progress the United States has made on race matters, Smart People illustrates for its audiences why a proper reckoning with racial formations, ideologies, attitudes, practices, and beliefs remains as urgently needed as ever. In so doing, the play participates in and extends a long tradition within black expressive culture of using theatre and performance to provoke social action and change.