Jackie Sibblies Drury's 'Fairview': Affect in Three Acts

Fairview, the 2019 Pulitzer Prize winning play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, examines notions of race and racism in the United States, as experienced by African-Americans under the white gaze of surveillance. The play is groundbreaking in both structure and content, as Drury invents an innovative form for her “dramedy” connected to her project of disrupting racism. In the script’s epigraph, the playwright acknowledges the influence of Frantz Fanon’s theories of surveillance; she employs unexpected comic techniques reminiscent of the tenets of absurdism to support her castigation of systemic racisms. Drury employs a shrewd investigation of the ways in which racist ideologies are constructed through the white gaze, then upends that notion as she makes the ramifications of being watched visible. Drury’s overall intention, to examine and critique the white surveillance state, is palpable in both the script and its performance as she creates an affective disconnect related to the play’s genre innovation. I examine, through a close reading of the text, the ways in which affect is built into the both idea of the play and its proposed influence on the spectator, and investigate the ways in which Drury blends/alternates between comedy and drama to affectively disrupt the audience in a way that makes sense in a contemporary world driven by relentless, ongoing, precarity.