Lili Robinson speaks to a world that’s awakening, as the play Mx moves to livestream
Talk show, clowning, folklore, and more combine in a show whose messages on race have become even more relevant
Lili Robinson draws on clowning and bouffon styles in Mx. Photo by Christache Ross
The Cultch presents Mx from February 18 to 24 via livestream.
ACTOR-PLAYWRIGHT LILI Robinson’s search for identity coincided with the rise of a social movement that’s since swept North America.
Mx was the form-pushing show that resulted from that quest, an award-winning mashup of history, folklore, clowning, magic realism, and the talk-show format. And as Robinson prepares for its livestream debut at the Cultch, the artist finds themself, the political landscape, and the arts scene even farther into a seismic shift than when Robinson debuted it at the Fringe Festival here in 2019.
“Writing this show that first time was how I figured out a lot of this stuff,” Robinson says. “It was very fresh in terms of my growing confidence that I do have a place talking about these things and my voice does count as a mixed-race person.”
The biracial theatre artist was raised in a white Vancouver family with no contact on their African-American father’s side.
“I wasn’t taught a lot of Black history,” Robinson says. “A lot of what we see is hip-hop and rap—that’s sort of all we see of black culture.”
A turning point, Robinson says, came in 2016, seeing news reports about the murders of two American Black men by police within two days of each other. Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old father of five, was shot in the chest and back in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile was shot and killed while reaching for his wallet in a car outside St. Paul, Minnesota. Both incidences were caught on cellphone video and sparked street protests—sparks for the movement that would become Black Lives Matter.
‘That was the first time I really viscerally realized I needed to figure this out,” Robinson says. “If this had been the States, it could have been my reality as well.”
At the same time, Robinson’s training at the Studio 58 theatre program was making the acting student increasingly aware of what it meant to be a performer of colour.
All these thoughts sparked Robinson to start writing Mx, a show that tackles themes of identity, race, and representation. The work, set up in the context of a talk show, finds flamboyant host Mz. Nancy (a play on Anansi, the trickster of West African and Caribbean legend) calling up mixed-race Max (Robinson), encouraging her young guest to connect with Black heritage and diaspora. Mz. Nancy’s foil is the white Samantha, who wants Max to accept the white status quo.
Emily Jane King, Lili Robinson, and Alisha Davidson in Mx. Photo by Christache Ross
The setup allows Robinson to nudge audiences to question the way they perceive others, and to consider how complicit they are in the marginalization and erasure of Blackness. But the artist does it with ample amounts of humour.
“A lot of [theatre] audiences in Vancouver are still older, wealthy, and white,” Robinson says. “I was interested in how to confront that dynamic in real time. I was already really interested in clowning and bouffon, and I thought that would be able to speak to that dynamic—to look someone in the eye or the camera to say, ‘I see you seeing me.’”
Spurred by the Fringe New Play Prize, in which the Vancouver Fringe and New Play Centre offer eight months of dramaturgy and rehearsal space, Robinson went on to win the Cultchivating the Fringe Award after Mx debuted. That prize landed Mx in the 2021 Cultch season—and has helped the artist rework it for this new virtual edition, shot with multiple cameras at the venue.
Over the past year, as Robinson has been recasting Mx for livestream, the artist has watched coverage of the murder of George Floyd, and witnessed Black Lives Matter grow into a force of change.
“The news cycle has caught up to it in a way that is more permanent,” Robinsons observes now. “White media didn't want to talk about it before. George Floyd was caught on camera in a way that people couldn't look away from.”
Robinson says the flood of Black and BIPOC voices that have come out amid the movement have provided them with even more confidence to pursue this new rendition of Mx, and take it further.
Luckily, the talk-show format of the play lends itself well to livestream. Robinson says the team has been working on ways to translate the previous live show’s audience interaction with cameras—and much of the time, that means addressing the audience directly down the lens in closeups.
“It’s really changed the relationship to the audience,” Robinson says. “In the original that was such a big element of the show, to walk through the audience and look people in the eye.”
All of this has meant that Robinson has had a full workload during the pandemic. The artist has been juggling the remount of Mx with work as emerging playwright in residence at Rumble Theatre and completing the 2020 emerging playwrights’ unit at the Arts Club.
“Yeah, it’s been busy; it feels like a big responsibility,” Robinson says. “But we need to take more breaks, especially to do with this global awakening around systems of oppression. It’s more important than ever for people to step back and do deep, deep reflection.”
Find tickets and more information here.
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