The Upper Room
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The Upper Room is an account of the friendship in the early 40s between Viktor Lowenfeld, a Jewish artist who fled Germany in 1938, and John Biggers, the well-known African-American artist who was one of his students at Hampton Institute. But Barr never really focuses on either man: the play begins with a mournful Hebrew prayer, flashes forward to a speech by Biggers when he returns in triumph to his alma mater, then flashes back to the story of the Lowenfeld era at Hampton, a black college founded by whites in Virginia. Biggers steps forward every now and then to narrate the Lowenfeld story, but he’s barely given preference over the two other students in the play–Barr’s stand-ins for all the young people Lowenfeld influenced.
In this reverse To Sir With Love, the teacher must encourage excessively docile pupils to challenge authority. There’s a fundamental tension between Lowenfeld’s commitment to liberal-arts education and Hampton Institute’s emphasis on bettering its students by training them to perform skilled labor, which runs the gamut from plumbing to teaching but doesn’t admit the possibility of a profession like art. Surely it was this tug-of-war between the educator and the educational institution that attracted Barr to the story in the first place, and not the hackneyed parallels between the oppression of Jews and the enslavement of black people. But it’s those parallels that get the most time. Barr makes his students unreasonably ignorant about events in Europe and gives Lowenfeld a convenient interest in jazz. He also glosses over some of the unattractive aspects of relations between African-Americans and Jews, including rather widespread anti-Semitism on one side and fairly prominent condescension on the other. I don’t expect a complete history of the civil-rights movement in a two-and-a-half-hour production, but the playwright’s omissions from the story are glaring.
