Clay is a one-man musical a lot of Northwestern students can relate to. It’s about a middle-class white kid from the suburbs who uses black hip-hop to help him express his personal frustrations.
Matt Sax, as Clifford, is that white kid—in real life a recent graduate of Northwestern University’s theater program, and a fine rapper. Sax enters the stage outfitted in a black hoodie with fake blood smeared across his face, disguising his baby features and timid voice behind a street hip-hop image. His hardened MC voice recalls the tough political language of Public Enemy. His actual voice sounds almost like a kid’s.
Sax cleverly uses these dual images to tell Clifford’s story, a gradual transition from suburban daddy’s boy to emotionally bruised rap narrator. Clifford reenacts moments from his childhood in flashback, adding rhymes that reveal his festering contempt for his cheating father, sexual frustrations and fear of talking. The plot takes some bizarre Oedipal turns and Sax draws from Hamlet and King Henry IV to fill out his character’s tragic brooding.
At times, when Clifford sits on the stage laying his wounded heart bare — in front of red velvet, for added drama — Clay can look like a hackneyed inner monologue (and an even worse Shakespeare adaptation).
But it becomes clear that Clay is fundamentally about Sax’s/Clifford’s appropriation of another culture’s medium. Sir John, an MC with a bookstore, takes in Clifford and teaches him to release his emotional burdens through freestyle. The velvet drapes surrounding Sax, then, are as much about solemnity as they are about performance. Hip-hop is a public venue for Clifford’s frustrations that won’t reprimand his self-expression. He rhymes, “Once I started rapping people started listening.”
Clay works so well because Sax uses hip-hop honestly as a form of storytelling and not as a gimmicky draw-in. After Clifford stumbles into fake ghetto-fab posturing by griping about his “bitches,” Sir John coaches him in authenticity: “It only comes out truthful if it comes from a truthful place.” Sax’s use of rap is as legitimate as any because it’s true.
Before Clifford goes onstage to rap to his first real audience, Sir John gives him the MC name “Clay.” Clay because Clifford uses hip-hop to mold his thoughts and feelings into art. The message is solid: “When words speak truth, hip-hip will prevail.”