Job defunds the police

Theater of War has taken its Job project (which I know from their Superstorm Sandy performances and from visits to my class by the director, Bryan Doerries), online. With excellent readers and in partnership with Exodus Transitional Community, an organization that helps people restart their lives after prison, it made for a powerful event. I might use the Job reading in a class in the future; with the right readers it really works in zoom. Job is more 'talking heads" than theater, and zoom's basic uncertainty about who a speaker is actually seeing and addressing - they seem to be looking at you but you know they may not be, and their gaze never quite meets yours - fits the edges of the variously hollow resonances of the speeches in Job.

(Theater of War's first online foray, a reading of scenes from Oedipus Rex in early May, didn't work as well for me, neither the zoom boxes - Greek tragedy needs to happen in a single space - nor the contemporary tie-in. Thebes is visited by a plague because of Oedipus' unwitting crime, which has no helpful parallels with the pandemic.)

As in all their work, this reading was followed by a discussion, kicked off by responses from representative members of the hosting community. Today's were all staff at Exodus who had themselves been sustained by it after long periods of incarceration, and were the sort of testimonials essential to the work of such organizations. Less about Job than about being saved, most sharing the importance of knowing that God had a plan for everyone. The ensuing discussion, a little zoom-disjointed too, moved more into reflection on our flawed "justice" system. Someone pointed out the "transactional" nature of the whole premise of Job (this was a theologian who knows what she was talking about). Another was reminded, in Job's receiving everything in double at the end, of the settlements for people who had been exonerated, their damages putting them into a social class they'd never been in before.

What's really resonating for me with the current moment is a Black woman from Toronto's observation that Job's friends had a "will to ignorance." It should be obvious to all with eyes that the system doesn't work for all, and yet those whom it serves persist in believing it does. Job (she didn't say but I'll hazard) probably used to think it worked too.