DAN QUAGLIANA
Managing Editor
PAC’s poster for Fairview. Designed by Alyssa Regrette.
For first-time director Nyles Emile, SUNY Fredonia’s Performing Arts Company’s (PAC) production of Fairview is a dream come true.
A 2018 play written by Jackie Sibblies Drury, Fairview won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Fairview confronts the issues of race, prejudice and class. More specifically, the Pulitzer board describes Fairview as a “hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors’ community to face deep-seated prejudices.”
The play is about a middle-class Black family preparing a birthday dinner for their grandmother while being watched by four white people.
“The show is very rambunctious, very over-the-top, very funny,” said Emile, a senior acting major. “It’s like you’re kind of living in a sitcom world.
“You meet the Frasers and, in another world, we have this group called the Watchers. [The Watchers are] these four college students who are watching their favorite episode from their favorite sitcom … We see how the two worlds collide together in the end.”
If that sounds unusual and a little confusing, that’s by design. “It’s one of those things where you can’t know that much about it [before watching it],” Emile explained.
But tackling such an ambitious project, on his first time directing, no less, was something that Emile dove right into without a second thought.
“About two years ago I knew I wanted to direct a show [but] I didn’t know what,” he said. “I knew I was able to do it with the Performing Arts Company … I went to go see [the play] Six Degrees of Separation and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I remember Fairview!’
For Emile, seeing Fairview was a pivotal moment in his high school career. He continues his interest in the play into his undergraduate studies through his upcoming directorial debut.
“I saw it when I was in high school, I did a project on it my freshman year and I was like, ‘Let me do this show!’”
Emile started asking other students in Fredonia’s theatre and dance program if they’d be interested in seeing him direct Fairview, and they all encouraged him to take on the project.
Additionally, it’s Emile’s first time directing a play.
“Directing is very much like you’re the leader of the ship,” he reflected. “It’s very much teaching me … how to delegate [tasks] … and to trust the people around you to know they will get the job done. You have to really count on the people underneath you and trust them to … know what you need.”
Behind the scenes of directing Fairview. Photograph by Alexis Barron.
Emile felt drawn to Fairview because of its importance: “It’s really groundbreaking and I found more courage to want to pitch it.”
The cultural significance of the play is something that’s been felt by audiences all over the country since it premiered off-Broadway in 2018.
“I think that I just have really deeply been moved by [the fact] that the people are having very different reactions in the same audience — and that the reactions don’t fall distinctly along color lines,” said Fairview’s playwright, Jackie Sibblies Drury, in a 2019 interview with NPR.
“It’s not that all people of color are moved by it, and all white people are uncomfortable and angered,” Drury continued. “It seems much more complex than that. And that, to me, has been really deeply exciting as a human and as an artist.”
Emile expressed a similar sentiment, saying that, “This show helps people to see [that] there’s so many biases and stereotypes around certain cultures…that’s where people immediately click and say, ‘Oh, this is about racism,’… which, it has some [race-related] parts to it, but I think … it’s really about people’s identities. How does your identity influence the world that we live in?”
According to Emile, this is the first time that PAC has produced a show with Black protagonists.
“I think this show, when you see it, will put a mirror up to [the audience], like, ‘Hey, this is who you identify as, and you have to understand what that may come with and the baggage that you may have along with that,’” Emile said. “I hope you’re open to understanding what your identity might mean to other people, too.”
PAC’s production of Fairview opens on Friday, Sept. 27, at 7:30 p.m. in the Alice E. Bartlett Theatre in the Rockefeller Arts Center. Tickets are $3 for students and $5 for the general public when purchased through the Campus Ticket Office. Additional showings are on Sept. 28 at 7:30 p.m. and Sept. 29 at 2 p.m.