I have only been to two plays in my life: A Junie B. Jones Musical, and Teach, Teacher, Teachest. After not really liking any of those two plays, I was pretty skeptical about liking the one that my class was going to go to on Wednesday, A Sucker Emcee. Even the title was odd to me, but I went to go see it anyways.

I met up with my professor, as well as a bunch of people from my Arts In NYC class, and we went to a questionable looking American restaurant that was only a few blocks from the theater. I was hungry out of my mind because that morning, I only had a bit of oatmeal. I was up for eating anything at this point…or was I? I was ecstatic when I looked at their menu and they served Chicken Parmesan, and I knew I was going to get that. However, my anxiousness to eat in that place was quickly put to a stop once I heard one of the girls from my class screaming in terror. Everyone looked at her and saw her panting, her eyes filled with tears, and droplets of sweat trickling down her face. She said that there had been a huge cockroach on her arm, and so she yanked her arm so hard that the roach fell to the floor of the restaurant. And to make matters worse, a boy from our group noticed another cockroach in the restaurant that made its way into the REFRIDGERATOR! And at that point, I just thought to myself: Oh hell no I’m not eating here! We immediately dropped our menus and scurried out that restaurant in pursuit of a more sanitary place, which we did find (YAY)! ***By the way, you might be wondering why I told you this anecdote, but I have my reason, I promise, which you shall understand soon.

We finally got to the theater and hogged all of the front row seats. The stage had a DJ playing hip-hop music and a brick wall background with colorful dim lights. When the play commenced, I later found out that it was a one-man show, which was perfect because that simple, yet creative, background really enabled the audience to fully attend to the speaker, Mums. Mums was amazing! Not only did he memorize over 90 minutes of dialogue, but he also put so much power into his words, which he rapped (and it rhymed)! He made his audience laugh, and want to cry all at the same time. He engaged his audience by making them a part of the play by often telling them to scream with him.

Mums revealed to the audience his struggles in life in the Bronx and how the only thing that would always come in his way was fear, hence the reason he was once called a Sucker Emcee. All his life he wanted to be a rapper, but fear was something that stood in the way of that. For example, when he was in grade school, a boy named Dallas challenged him to a rap battle, but Mums did horribly because he was scared. Another one of his fears was disappointing his mother, who he aspired to be like. His mom was the only person in her family to go to college and get a masters degree. She kept on underscoring the importance of Mums also going to college and becoming somebody. But Mums discovered that college wasn’t for him. Instead, he formed a rap duo called “Uncontrolled Substance”. He presented a song that the duo wrote called “Super Cucaracha”, and that was when our whole class bursted into laughter. What are the odds that Mums would rap about hating cockroaches in motels when we just experienced these same creatures in a restaurant less than an hour ago!

Mums rapped for a while, and even though he wasn’t bad, when given the opportunity, he switched to acting because that is what gave him money. He soon realized, however, that acting wasn’t for him. And this brings up the prevailing theme in the play: Mums’ search for identity. Was college for him? Was acting for him? Or was it being an Emcee? Mums ultimately realized that he was born to be an Emcee. Today, Mums is 46 years old and is STILL a rapper, and stated that he will always be one. The whole purpose of the play was Mums trying to explain and justify how he got to rapping on this stage in front of a crowd of people. His beautiful rhetoric and poetic diction were truly inspirational to the audience.

Of all the things that Mums rapped about, one thing in particular touched me. It was his mother. This once “successful and strong figure” in his family quickly became weakened by Alzheimer’s disease. Mums told the audience that that morning, she raised a knife at him, her own son! When I saw how hurt Mums was when describing that scene, I automatically thought to myself: either this guy is an amazing actor or he’s telling us a story that actually happened to him. And as it turns out, everything that Mums rapped about was true. However, the part when he said his mom raised a knife at him actually transpired a while ago. His mother is now in a nursing home and is doing much better. But all of this just makes me respect Mums even more as an actor. He has to constantly refer to that awful episode with his mother when he raps to his audiences, and yet he still hasn’t become desensitized to that incident; each time he recites it, he feels the pain. And to me, that’s not acting; that’s showing that you are human, and that’s why I have great respect for Mums.

America was initially supposed to be a classless society, one where everybody got an equal opportunity to succeed and thrive, right? At least that’s what my parents thought when they were trying to win the visa lottery to come to NYC. I can just picture their innocent, naive faces filled with all these fantastic hopes and dreams of the city as they boarded the plane to NY. God I wish I were there just so I could slap them back to sanity and tell them to lower their expectations, because this myth of “a classless society” in America was some EPIC hogwash.

NYC is filled with immigrants that all share the same goals of wanting to make money and rise to the top. That’s right, I said it: the top. And that must mean that there’s a bottom, as well as an in-between. Simply put, NY, just like the rest of America, has class division. We’ve got the elite upper class that accumulates wealth and dominates this capitalistic society, the middle class that produces that wealth and owns nothing but a few private belongings, and the lower class that can barely make it through the life without the constant worry of a financial burden.

There’s no way that a true New Yorker could picture his city without having an image of a minority group of millionaires dominating our marketing system. It’s just not going to happen. And I’m not going to say all, but a handful of people view the upper class in a negative light. We see the rich as either those that were born into wealth and didn’t work a single day in their life, or simply those that acquired their money through illegal practices. And I believe that it is largely the media that is responsible for shaping this perception of ours of the rich in NY.

Take Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” for example. It’s about an ambitious young stockbroker, Bud Fox, who would do anything just to work with his idol, Gordon Gekko, a legendary Wall Street broker. Gekko was part of the upper class; he had too much money if you ask me (if there is such a thing), yet he was constantly greedy for more. He would destroy anyone and anything that stood in his way of getting what he wanted. He took advantage of the innocent, desperate, working class Bud and made him do insider trading for him. In return, Bud got a taste of the “good life” which he then gave up once he realized Gekko’s true colors.

Oliver Stone’s movie reinforces our perception of the rich who are thought of as incapable of making money the honest way through the characters of Gekko and Bud. His movie shows how corrupt the upper class can be and how far they are willing to go to get what they want. And this is why movies like “Wall Street”, along with other forms of media, are part of the reason why the upper class has a negative connotation.