‘Rasheeda’ doesn’t actually exist. ‘Rasheeda’ is the generic, snidely joking name a group of rich white men on the commuter bus into Chicago give to middle-aged black women who work in the service industries. ‘Rasheeda’ is their coded replacement for ‘nigger’. We’re told all this by Jaclyn – a middle-aged black woman who works at a hospital reception, played with subtle power and a sly sense of fun by Tanya Moodie.
You try to keep Jaclyn down at your own peril. She won’t be silenced, squashed or sidelined – although Joel Drake Johnson’s play is about her white colleagues trying to do just that. There’s the oleaginous surgeon, Dr David Williams (Bo Poraj, finding a convincing blend of obnoxious entitlement and exasperation), and Ileen, recently promoted to office manager – essentially so she can take notes on Jaclyn. The doc doesn’t like her, and wants her out. Drawing Ileen into this plot leads to a weird, tense series of micro-aggressions and full-blown stand-offs.
Jaclyn is a slippery character. She’s a hoot: Moodie’s comic timing is a joy to behold, and initially there’s a warmth to the two women’s interactions. But Jaclyn is also often a terrible employee, outrageously rude to patients. She can be petty, paranoid, overdramatic, and she tells some very tall tales.
So there are legitimate reasons why Dr Williams doesn’t want her working for him. But this over-privileged white dude, as revealed in not-always-convincing dialogue, is also gliding over deep oceans of prejudice. People of colour are constantly othered in his language choices. He insists his dislike of Jaclyn is not about race, but his unconscious bias is tsunami-strong.
He’s soon got Ileen into a state of near hysteria, terrified that Jaclyn will turn violent. Johnson really overplays his cards here: the extremity of her reaction seems pretty improbable, and while Ileen is nicely drawn at first – and imbued with the right balance of sweet and sour by Elizabeth Berrington – she soon loses credibility.
Johnson’s created a fascinating character in Jaclyn, and Moodie rises to it excellently. But the play itself rarely feels urgent: line-by-line, there’s too much banal office chat, not helped by plodding, pedestrian directing from Jonathan O’Boyle. And while it makes a welcome swerve away from the victim-of-racism plot you might anticipate, as an examination of unconscious prejudice it doesn’t actually have that much to say.
Maybe this is revealing my own bias, but ‘Rasheeda Speaking’ simply feels like the latest in a stream of naturalistic and highly conventional American ‘issue play’ imports that it’s hard to get excited by.