catering to the audience

Mr Parr,

So I'm just confused about why you wrote a play that ended in "a white man." That was literally the ending. And I'm trying to think hard about what Maiesha said. That revolutionary acts can come in many different ways. I think one revolutionary act would have been centering Ethel as the agent of her spiritual salvation. And I know that theatre has to be written with the audience in perspective. But I do not know how to reconcile the desire to please the audience with a story that is truthful, or at least tries to tell the truth without putting other motives first. And the truth has to be mindful of the past. This question makes me think about hip-hop. How it has become commercial, and how the audience often takes precedence over the product. I am not trying to call out any specific genre of rap or rapper. I just want to challenge the notion that people need to worry about getting others to feel a certain way rather than expressing personal emotion and sentiment. And in writing a play, a personal desire for racial unity should not trump the personal narrative of a woman who never had the option to be dependent on a white man or look to them on advice to live her life that would have been beneficial to her. I think that hip-hop artists can look to their audience because hip-hop is about the audience, the interaction, but at the same time, the sentiment has to be true to the artist or it does not uplift the performer and the audience, and hip-hop was born partly out of a desire for self-empowerment.