Antoine A play exploring crossing over from boyhood to manhood
By Antoine Craigwell
While the play “Tickets to Manhood” brings perceptions and definitions of manhood, maleness and masculinity in this new century into stark relief, it encourages those who witness its staging to consider perspectives which makes it a must see. Many would recall from history lessons or from personal experience the cultural and societal rituals when a boy crosses over to become a man. For many of these cultures, it is a sign that the young boy, adolescent or pubescent, is no longer expected to cling to his mother’s skirts and mix with the female members of the community, but to assume the role as a man. Circumcision rituals and religious ceremonies, still practiced in many cultures and ethnicities, marks the time young boys go away with the elders for a period of training and initiation to return as men. For those men struggling to understand themselves and those women trying to understand the men in their lives, the play invites the audience to ponder, reexamine and evaluate their views on masculinity and what it means to be a man.
Over a period of three Thursday to Saturday weekends, beginning with its opening on Jul 14, “Ticket to Manhood” is playing at the Dixon Place Experimental Theater at 161A Chrystie Street in NYC’s Lower Eastside. The play features five scenes, each exploring the factors influencing a man’s life, from his days as a boy to when he becomes an adult male. It is one of a slate of performances scheduled for the 20th Anniversary of HOT!, the NYC Celebration of Queer Culture from Jun 24 to Aug 6, and the 25th Anniversary of the Dixon.
A press statement about the play says that, James Scruggs, the play’s writer, producer, and actor as Walter, explores some conventional ways boys become men. The play looks at religion, imprisonment, gang violence, marriage and military service as some of the societal norms which form a rite of passage to shape boys into men. It also examines the choices boys make as they mature into men. The statement suggests that in many urban communities, prison and gang involvement as viable options are sometimes seen as choices equivalent to more socially accepted forms of transitioning from boyhood to manhood.
The play, directed by Mark Rayment, features Douglas Allen, Maximilian Balduzzi, Spencer Scott Barros, Gerard Joseph and Scruggs, each performing scenes of the experience of a man who through being forced by some present circumstance recounts his growing up with the presence and or absence of his father as a measurement of what type of man he has become and what he would have liked to be. Prior to staging his play, Scruggs, a member of the Black LGBT writer’s workshop, Other Countries, which meets regularly at NYC’s LGBT Center, underwent several revisions and readings to arrive at his finished product.
According to the press statement, the five men, whose stage names in the play are Scott, Bernard, Ennio, Walter and Omen do not apologize for their choices. Scott, played by Barros, as a marine in a military vignette, joins the military to define his masculinity, goes off to war and returns as a trained killer and in retrospection he asks himself who he is. Each man, through his experience asks what made him a man, when the transformation occurred and what type of man is he.
“I began looking at classical rites of passage and noted that here in America, there is not one universally accepted introduction to manhood today. When the draft was active, there was the notion that boys went off to defend their nation and as a result, came back men. There is apparently a real need for some kind of transition experience,” says Scruggs, who in 2005 received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowship.
During a Jul 16 performance, the audience of approximately 50 people sat transfixed in the small theater. Each actor executed his lines faultlessly and imbued his delivery with passion and emotion, as if undergoing some cathartic experience and it was clear that the all male cast had worked hard to master their parts. As monologues and with lots of shouting, the five actors delivered their lines, which came across as angry explosive rants, taking the audience on a raw emotional journey through their expressed feelings and thoughts. On some occasions, the shouting and raised voices seemed to threaten and to obscure the actors’ message of introspection and examination of their contemporaneous construction of their respective masculinities.
In the final scene, when all five men came together in a group therapy session, which seemed to be a simulated enactment of a delayed rite of passage ceremony, along with the admissions of homosexuality by at least two, another two eventually confessed to being part of a court appointed program to lessen their sentences. Most telling during this session was the heated exchange between Omen, played by Joseph, the young man who found meaning and belonging in a gang and as a drug runner, and Scott, played by Barros, who was in this instance the group facilitator. Scott tried to get Omen to reach into himself, get in touch with his feelings, and examine them, especially his resentment and anger toward his absent father and the role played in his life by the character Willie Songs, the drug and gang kingpin, who had become a surrogate father.
Today, with the absence of viable role models, examples from society to which boys could look and learn as they transition from boyhood to manhood, Scruggs says that boys are creating their own rites of passage. Urban youth, he says, all too often look almost romantically to prison experiences and gang involvement to affirm themselves as men.
“In these socially unacceptable forms of initiation, the rites are identical to ones that are acceptable. Boys are sequestered away from their families; they are broken down, indoctrinated and built up again in a new image as a member of this new group,” says Scruggs.
In this final scene, through the voice of Scott, Scruggs, says:
“There was a time when boys spent time with their father./All day./Learned the skills that their fathers had./There was a transference of information./From father to son./Just from spending quality time with each other./ The son received his notions of masculinity on a cellular level from being close to his father./He knew what it meant to be a man./Because he had his example, his father right there beside him./And when it came time for him to cross over from boyhood to manhood,/There was an event,/A ritual,/Involving the whole community/Boys went away with the elder men as boys,/And came back men./Today, many boys approach manhood unconsciously, and some get stuck in adolescence./Some males never leave adolescence behind./”Tickets to Manhood” asks the questions: “How do boys become men today[?]”/”is every adult male a man[?]”/”If you are an adult male, at what moment did you become a man[?]”/”If you are an adult male, do you consider yourself a man[?]”/”What makes you a man[?]”.”
