Pouring Tea: Innovative One-Man Show Comes to Columbus

The Departments of English and Theatre have joined forces to bring the Ohio State community a challenging one-person show that has left its mark on cities across the country. Award-winning scholar and performer E. Patrick Johnson will present Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Stories at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, October 3 at the Roy Bowen Theatre. The show is based on interviews with black gay men who are Southern by birth and upbringing, and who have chosen to remain in the South as adults. When the narratives were collected between 2004 and 2006, the men ranged in age from 19 to 93. The complete oral history has been published by the University of North Carolina Press as Sweet Tea.

Johnson's work is best described as Performance Studies, the innovative field that continues to invigorate many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. Serving as chair of the Performance Studies Department at Northwestern University, Johnson helps ensure the field's institutional strength, but he also lends to its intellectual growth by encouraging scholars to remain attentive to methodology. Because he insists upon not just studying performance but also doing it, he recognizes that performance itself is a mode of knowledge production.

Johnson's earlier study, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003), has earned significant acclaim, including the Errol Hill Book Award from the American Society for the Theatre Research and the National Communication Association's Lilla Heston Award. In Appropriating Blackness, one is struck by Johnson's commitment to foregrounding his mother's voice and her perspective on her work as a domestic; he reveals her to be an intellectual in her own right. No doubt, Johnson also presents the men featured in this new performance/study in their full glory-as the skilled cultural critics that they have become while navigating this nation's rugged social terrain.

[Essay courtesy of Dr. Koritha Mitchell, assistant professor, Department of English, The Ohio State University]