The Set / House

The play's primary set, the Frasier family home, represents and evokes a stylistic and narrative familiarity in the audience and the reader. As the author describes it in stage directions, it has the feel of popular entertainments that portray black families and black life in a way that is grounded in qualities of entertainment, rather than in qualities of pure realism. Later in the play, as conflict between the black and non-black characters climaxes, the author's stage directions describe the set as "feel[ing] destroyed" (98). Metaphorically, this suggests the idea that the preconceptions about the lives of the black characters on all the play's various levels of meaning - the black characters, the non-black Act Two characters, the audience - have themselves been destroyed.

The “Mirror”

The "mirror" on the fourth wall of the Frasier family home, i.e. the invisible fourth wall between...