‘Dream Life of Malcolm X’ heightens the debate about who has the right to tell which story

Though Wilkins identifies as African American, he is white-passing enough to not get followed at the grocery store.

Oakland playwright John Wilkins wrote “The Dream Life of Malcolm X,” whose Oakland Theater Project production runs Aug. 6-Sept. 5. Photo: Brontë Wittpenn / The Chronicle

Editor’s note: On July 28, Oakland Theater Project announced it was canceling “The Dream Life of Malcolm X.” Managing Director Colin Mandlin wrote in an email, “We have just experienced a COVID-19 exposure and breakthrough infection in the workplace from someone who was fully vaccinated.”

Oakland theater artist and critic John Wilkins has been asked about his race his whole life.

A barista might ask when he’s buying an espresso. Or a student during one of his classes in the Writing and Literature program at California College of the Arts. And recently, when he presented excerpts from his new show, “The Dream Life of Malcolm X,” an Oakland Theater Project board member asked if he had another “secret life.”

Often, he says, it’s Black people who ask. “They can see,” Wilkins said.

“The easiest way to explain it, genetically,” he says, “is that three of my four grandparents are African American. I have one white grandparent. (The three) are within what I would call the upper-class, light-skinned African American community. That’s the world I was born into.”

Wilkins’ father, John Robinson Wilkins, was the first Black tenured law professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law. His grandfather, J. Ernest Wilkins Sr., served as undersecretary of labor in the Eisenhower administration, making him the first Black person to attend cabinet-level meetings. 

I thought a fellow theater critic was white. When I learned I was wrong, I had much to reassess

Actor William Hodgson (left) listens to director Dawn L. Troupe’s feedback during a rehearsal of Oakland Theater Project’s “The Dream Life of Malcolm X” in the parking lot of Flax Art & Design in Oakland. Photo: Brontë Wittpenn / The Chronicle

Wilkins identifies as African American, but his appearance, he says, allows him freedoms some Black people don’t enjoy, like not getting followed when he shops at the grocery store.

“I easily maneuver throughout the world in ways that many African Americans cannot,” he said. “Is that a type of passing? I don’t know. It’s not something that I choose. It’s just something that happens.” When he meets someone new, he tries to drop hints about his race rather than make a grand announcement about it.

For years now, theater and the arts more broadly have confronted the question of who should be allowed to tell stories about historically marginalized groups. The concern is artistic as well as political. Artists who hail from those groups have long been denied the right to tell their own stories, while those with the power to tell them have regularly gotten things wrong or used those narratives for their own nefarious, oppressive purposes. 

Oakland Theater Project’s production of Wilkins’ “The Dream Life of Malcolm X,” which runs Aug. 6-Sept. 5, involves an all-Black creative team. But with Wilkins, who can pass for white, as the playwright, the show raises the authorship issue in a more nuanced way, focusing not just on skin color and identity but on lived experience.

Ruth Negga (left) and Tessa Thompson in “Passing,” which is set to be distributed by Netflix. Photo: Netflix

The show arrives at the same time that racial passing — the phenomenon in which a person of one race is perceived as belonging to another — is the subject of two prestigious artistic endeavors.  

In May, Brit Bennett published “The Vanishing Half,” a novel about two African American twin sisters, one of whom decides to pass as white. Its concept owes a debt to Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel “Passing,” a film adaptation of which is scheduled to be distributed by Netflix this year. Rebecca Hall, best known as an actor of stage and screen (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”), writes and directs, having been drawn to the story based on her own background as the white-presenting daughter of white father Peter Hall, a theater director, and Black mother Maria Ewing, an opera singer. Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson star. 

Many Black artists lack the option to pass, which can be a source of tension between those who have a choice and those who don’t, complicating questions about what constitutes an authentic representation of a race or culture.

Oakland theater artist Dazié Grego-Sykes compares Wilkins’ situation to his own, that of a light-skinned Black man who does not have the option to pass himself but who has family members who do.

“People get just as upset when you pass for white as when you play up your Blackness,” he said. “There’s no real way to land dead-center in the middle where everybody’s happy.”

Dazié Grego-Sykes in his solo performance (whose title uses a racial epithet) during the 26th annual Fringe Festival at the Exit Theatre in San Francisco in 2017. The piece is a multidisciplinary performance-based inquiry into Black identity. Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle 2017

Still, he said, “there’s best practices.” For example, he knows he’s granted privileges that some darker-skinned Black men are not, because of his pigmentation and the way he speaks. “I’m really conscious of my privilege as a light-skinned person,” he said. “I allow people who are darker than me to tell me what their experience is — I don’t tell them what theirs is — and when they tell me, I believe them. I stay in my lane.”

Grego-Sykes investigated his own relationship to Blackness in a 2017 solo show (whose title uses a racial slur) at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Now he’s working on a follow-up called “Decolorism,” which asks, “What does it mean to have your Blackness taken from you?”

In discussing Wilkins’ situation, Grego-Sykes pondered whether a white person would have the right to write a play about Malcolm X. “In a dreamier, better world,” he said, “white historians, white artists, white engineers would be doing all kinds of work that was in alignment with Black people’s values, with Black people’s histories, with Black people’s present.

“I want a person who can pass for white that is Black to know that they’re Black,” he continued. “I want that. I don’t want them walking around pretending that they’re not. But then I want to get picky, and I want to get finicky, when you talk about your experience. I want you to be careful how you say what you say and how you do what you do. I really want you to know your place” — just as he tries to with his own relationship to Blackness.

Rotimi Agbabiaka in Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience’s “An American Ma(u)l” at Brava Theater. Photo: Gareth Gooch / Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience

Bay Area theater artist Rotimi Agbabiaka, who was born and raised in Lagos before moving to the U.S. as a teen, has never had the option to “pass” in the typical sense. “Coming from Nigeria, I would say my idea of race was different. In a way, I didn’t realize I was Black until I came to America,” he said.

But he has experienced passing culturally.

“When I go to some places around the world, I am treated differently if I read as an American as opposed to if I read as an African or Nigerian,” Agbabiaka said. I’ve been in situations where sounding ‘white’ can actually put you at a disadvantage. It can put a target on your back, or (you) become someone who is viewed with suspicion, like you’re not down, you’re not really one of us.”

Rotimi Agbabiaka during a performance of “Psychopomp” by We Players in McLaren Park in San Francisco. The show performs for audience pods of one or two at a time as a walk-through experience at the park. Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Within the context of art and theater, Agbabiaka, who has worked with a plethora of organizations from the San Francisco Mime Troupe to American Conservatory Theater to the de Young Museum, does not think it is imperative that an artist disclose their race, especially if their race is ambiguous. 

“I think ambiguity may be a really interesting thing to explore in art and to have the audience question it, because ultimately race is an artificial construct,” he said.  

But Agbabiaka has never subscribed to the idea that a person can be “ambiguously Black,” because he does not think that looking or sounding Black looks like one thing. 

Director Dawn L. Troupe (left) and local playwright John Wilkins observe rehearsal of Oakland Theater Project’s “The Dream Life of Malcolm X.” Photo: Brontë Wittpenn / The Chronicle

Wilkins agrees. “African American life as it’s imagined in this country is almost a cliche. People have this narrative — it’s a very powerful narrative — about what African Americans should be.”

But Oakland, he said, belies the stereotypes. “You have lawyers. You have businessmen. You have insurance men. You have skateboard freaks. You have punk rockers,” he said. “When you look at white life, people can do anything, and they can be anything. The possibilities seem limitless. They are for many African Americans, too; it’s just that people don’t notice in the same way.”

As for whether he has license to pen a play about Malcolm X, Wilkins offers three distinct answers in succession.

First, he said, “It’s a legitimate aesthetic question and a legitimate social question that I wouldn’t denigrate in any way. On the other hand, I totally and absolutely believe that anyone should be able to write about anything that they feel at any time. That is their prerogative as free artists; they should just be prepared to accept the criticism that might come their way.”

Actors William Hodgson (right) and William Oliver III rehearse a scene from Oakland Theater Project’s “The Dream Life of Malcolm X.” Photo: Brontë Wittpenn / The Chronicle

His second answer, he acknowledged, is “a little smartass-y”: Maybe he shouldn’t write the play. But at the same time, “Do I have the perspective to write about myself? Probably not.”

And finally: “As soon as we decided that the name of the piece was ‘The Dream Life of Malcolm X,” I felt like I was in my element. I understood dreams; I understood thwarted dreams; I understood Black dreams; I understood how they can get perverted.”

That lens gave him a new understanding of Malcolm X’s political philosophy, he said. “I felt indicted by his ideas, and I enjoyed that.”

“The Dream Life of Malcolm X”: Written by John Wilkins. Directed by Dawn L. Troupe. Aug. 6-Sept. 5. $10-$50. Flax Art & Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland. oaklandtheaterproject.org

  • Lily Janiak and Morayo Ogunbayo