But Wolfe won't give up on his idealistic mission and just go home when told to. Both Gray and Kawahara reflect their artistic lineages. In Gray, it is the seemling artless simplicity of Sam Shepherd's early surrealist plays, a virtual no-man's land of a dreamscape, with an imaginative power play, of good and evil, good guys and bad guys in a Badland. In this anguished, black-comic environment is a clash of languages where the British sneer at inferior American accents. In the return of the Ugly American, a U.S. shrink stereotypes Africans as inferior children, using less polished racism than the phrases with which his colonist predecessor, a British Tour Guide, poisons the air while strutting in his Hollywood Safari guide garb.
Language is always a translation from culture.
Although, the British Tour Guide, the Shrink and the students are all speaking English, they are speaking from the musical diversity of dialects, but are translating from the constellations of each indiviual culture. There is a showdown in the firing of linguistic bullets, like Sam Shepard's language shoot out between jazz and rock and roll, with generational connotations. Gray's work also works on an actual level of experience. Historically and biologically, black and white are One. His response to what distinguishes human consciousness from that of our Darwinian predecessors is that humans are art-makers, they tell stories.