The Pulitzer-Winning Play 'Fairview' Is About Being Watched While Black

The play Fairview has won all kinds of acclaim from critics and audiences, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury. It first ran last year at Soho Rep in Manhattan, and has now been remounted at Brooklyn's Theatre for a New Audience this summer.

If for some reason you only caught the first few minutes, you'd probably wonder what all the fuss was about. A middle-class black family in a carefully decorated townhouse prepares a birthday dinner for grandma — a setup, perhaps, out of a '70s sitcom.

Then things start to get weird, and then really, really weird. To say much more would be a spoiler, but the banality of it all does become central to the play's final (and deeply uncomfortable) punch.

That concept came out of conversations with director Sarah Benson, Sibblies Drury says.

"We were