"There's gonna be some gunshots," playwright Sharon N. Williams warned before Hoodies Up! started. "I know we're on Rainier..." The audience laughed. It's a joke that's funny for a second before becoming horrifying, the kind of joke you make because the context of where this thing is happening should not go unacknowledged. This was a set of seven short plays responding to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, staged in the gorgeously situated and landscaped Rainier Valley Cultural Center on Rainier Avenue South, a street where more than a quarter of the city's homicides this year have taken place. A man was fatally shot on Rainier Avenue two days before this show. There's gonna be some gunshots.
Hoodies Up! was written, cast, rehearsed, and performed in a matter of weeks. It played only one night to a mostly full room. The producer, Tyrone Brown, said he was inspired to put it on in part by his mother, who, after the Martin shooting, began calling every night to make sure he'd gotten home safely.
The plays themselves were relentless in their message that black America and white America are still largely two different countries, especially when it comes to gun violence, the police, and the coded language of behavior that, misapplied or misinterpreted, can get you killed. In Lois Mackey's Trees in the Window, a black mother urged a white mother to teach her biracial son the rules "all black boys" need to follow when they get pulled over. "One," she said, and put her hands up in front of her, gripping an invisible steering wheel: "Keep your hands on the steering wheel." As she spoke that line, audience members—chillingly, matter-of-factly—murmured it along with her, like they'd said it many times before. "It's just wrong," the white woman pouted. "That's what black mamas been saying for 200 years!" the black mom spat back.
In Bottom Line, written by José Amador, three kids (Latino, white, black), all in hoodies, discussed and argued while a nearly silent figure sat at the back of the stage. Toward the end, she stood to speak: "Here we are, 20 years after the Rodney King riots, and we're still at 'Why can't we all just get along?' Figure this shit OUT!"
The word (and image) "hoodie" was suddenly so resonant, this funny cotton object heavy with meaning. You can plop those young people on a stage, hoodies on, backs to the audience, silent as death, and it's powerful.
Stitching things together toward the end was Stranger Genius Award–winner Paul Mullin, whose White Boy Can Take a Punch was the tightest piece in the show. It told an autobiographical story about Mullin's time in Washington, DC, at a new job, navigating the racial tension between established black workers and his young, white self.
The acting was hit or miss, with some standouts (especially the casts of White Boy and Bottom Line). Those aforementioned gunshots went off almost at random, mistimed and disconnected from the violence onstage. But all that seems a forgivable matter of the short time frame in which this was assembled. In the end, with everyone onstage and producer Brown addressing the audience before a moment of silence, it felt like one more large and valuable conversation, the kind that sends tendrils of itself into the world. "Trayvon Martin was a tipping point," Brown said. His death sent people into action—telling their legislators to rethink (or dismantle) "shoot first" laws, marching in protests, making art and theater. "I am skeptical there are any new insights on the Trayvon Martin affair left that theater can illuminate," a commenter said on an early blog thread about this show.
Wrong. So wrong. 
