Trying to Unpack Mothers
I wish I had not read the author’s note in the beginning, just so I can see what my own imagination can do with the script. There are a lot of ideas presented to the reader: motherhood, femininity, socio-economic status, race, and gender roles. The paragraph about how Asian-Americans have historically aligned with whiteness read me like a book. I learned about the racial triangulation theory in my ethnic minorities class last year. This theory explains the workplace acceptance of Black, Asian, and White folk based on data collected through workplace employers: superiority/inferiority and outsider/insider. This theory places Black workers further on the scale of being an insider, and Asian workers are measured to be more foreign. On the superiority scale, Asian workers measure higher than Black workers. Whether people choose to believe the theory or not, there is still a lot to be explored in the relationship of Asian and Black folks based on colorism alone (operating within each marginalized community). My familiarity of the external pressures of racial triangulation and internal pressures of colorism played a foundational role of my interpretation of the tense relationship amongst the women, man, and war in the play. Of course, so many other themes are layered into this story, motherhood being the central theme, but the intersection of race is something that I’m most sensitive to when I read plays like this.
Moench explores motherhood as a battle, which gets more complicated as the outside world explodes with rebellion and war. I think the reason Moench packs politics, race, and class into this confusing play is to show the audience that motherhood is a culmination of all these parts of the world, on top of duty and love. Definitely a play that needs a second read on my end.
