Still, the efforts of Guare and director Wolfe to go further are tangible. There is constant dialogue about the political situation, racist laws and willing miscegenation. And the wigs fall off later in the play and the scenery takes on a modernist feel when the Free Man's fortunes begin to decline. At the end, Coronet recognizes that he has lived frivolously and he gets a tragic comeuppance.
The tragedy of Louisiana's joining the United States becomes apparent too. New York playgoers see the downfall of the free people of color as clearly as anyone who has lived in the 7th ward or talked to anyone from New Orleans or rural Louisiana whose families went back to before "les Americains" arrived. They will tell you that the next 200 plus years were an uphill battle.
That brings us to today.
History for Today's Audiences
The fact that the outside world has seen beyond Katrina to that tragedy's historical beginnings is somewhat revelatory. How many people besides us knew that what we saw in the days after the storm was the result of a 200-year struggle being invisible? It's good to know that the consciences of people away from New Orleans are still grappling with the consequences of bad choices made by the U.S. government, when the federal leadership bungled and tripped and then fell on us.
Perhaps people can now understand the place of our culture and environment in that long sweep of history - a series of political and racial splatters and missteps as far as we were concerned. Our local response was to do what we do in the gayest way possible -- which may at first seem funny and outrageous to outsiders, but which, to us, has defined our being outside and within America. Our over-the-top culture has provided the means to survive the vagaries and prejudices of government from the colonial era through the U.S. Constitution which said people were equal and should be treated as such -" everybody but us, of course.
The play A Free Man of Color addresses this inequality in America. But our New Orleans community has had a front row seat to this drama for centuries. One of the earliest written documents by free men of color is their 1804 letter to the American governor:
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