Rage Is Not A 1-Day
Thing!
STAGE
of the Art www.aate.com
Review by Karen Libman
Winter
2002 Volume 14 Number 2
Awele Makeba.
If you haven't heard this name yet, you should have. I guarantee you
that you will again. And when you get to see her perform, you are in for a
treat. Awele (pronounced ah-WAY-lay) is an actress/storyteller who will
restore your faith in the power of theatre for young audiences. And even
if your faith doesn’t need restoring, she will inspire you and help you to
remember how important theatre, for young or old, can truly be. Awele is
the most stirring performer that I have seen in years, and her one-woman show, Rage
Is Not A 1-Day Thing! is a captivating, fascinating, work of art.
I am not one to
rave. I have seen my share of one-person shows, in theatres and in schools.
I've seen hundreds of storytellers, and I have performed in more than a
few public schools myself. But I was swept away by Rage
and I am not the only one. Check out these reviews:
"Awele Makeba's work inspires new questions about how to teach and
learn
history. Her presentation cannot help but provoke an emotional response
that engages all facets of our common humanity and makes us question how
much we really understand the past. This is her success: she unsettles our
understanding of what we thought we knew so that we can come to know in
new ways."
Sam Wineburg, Professor, Cognitive Studies in Education and
Adjunct Professor, Dept. of History, University of Washington
"Rage Is Not A 1-Day Thing!
should be a required experience for everyone alive. "
Nancy Duncan, Storyteller, Former Artistic Director of The Emmy Gifford
Children's Theatre
"She's a blessing in disguise in this school district."
LeBron McPhail, Principal, Butte Elementary School, Palmer, Alaska
I am not the only one to be impressed. Rage plunges us into the world of 1950s Montgomery, Alabama, where
blacks must give up their bus seats to whites, simply if white people them.
The setting is the United States on the brink of profound changes. It’s
the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, told not only through the heroism of
Rosa Parks (whom Awele also portrays) and Martin Luther King Jr.'s rhetoric but
also through the words of the common person, the ones who did not make the
history textbooks. We see two young women, whose names have not come down
through history, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, but who also, by not
relinquishing their bus seats, give life to this seminal event in US history.
With the "authority of Maya Angelou and the dramatic gifts of an Anna
Deveare Smith," (Holt Uncensored), Awele transforms herself first into
Claudette Colvin, the Alabama teen who was arrested in 1955 (before Rosa Parks,)
for refusing to move from her bus seat, and then into many others, including
Mary Louise Smith, JoAnn Robinson, and Rosa Parks. This is a play that
focuses our attention on how a "regular" person can make a difference;
indeed, how, that has always been the way that change occurs.
It’s October 2001, and I'm in Hamilton,
Michigan, in an all-white white (excepting two students) high school, waiting
for the performance to begin. Seven pairs of shoes line the forestage.
A few empty chairs are arranged in rows. There is a large glass jar
with money in it. The middle-schoolers, guests in the high school auditorium for
this production, wait patiently through a lengthy introduction by the media
specialist. And then Awele (as Claudette) bursts onto the stage, and tells
us how it happened. That day March 2nd,
1955, she, Claudette Colvin, wouldn’t get up from her seat on the bus. In
the first five minutes of this 60-minute piece, Awele is Claudette, as well as the bus driver, a pregnant woman who does
move, and a white woman who exclaims, "I hope she's not one of those
trouble makers." And when the bus driver insists that Claudette must
move, another character, a teen on that bus, shouts, "She ain't got to do
nothing but stay black and die!" a refrain echoes through the production.
With this sparse set, a pair of glasses and a shawl, Awele transports her
audience back in time
Those seven
pairs of shoes come to symbolize all the people whose stories we don't
know fully, who, because of the bus boycott, walked to work and every place
else in order to attain the right to sit on the bus. The jar comes to
symbolize not only the fare collection, but also personal responsibility. Awele
uses it to ask of the audience, “What would you do about injustice?” In
one of the most affecting portions of the play, Awele runs into the audience as
Claudette, collecting money for her "Stay Black and Die" Campaign, to
help free Jeremiah Reeves, her classmate, who is falsely accused of raping a
white girl. (He is later convicted and electrocuted). Awele runs
through the audience shaking the jar and shouting, "Can anybody give some
money, a penny, nickel, dime quarter, dollar, that's all I want? Don’t
you believe in fairness? Social justice? STAY BLACK AND DIE
CAMPAIGN. Have you ever been treated unfairly? Have you ever been
falsely accused of something? Have your life threatened?" The
audience, clearly uncomfortable that Makeba has come into their
space, doesn’t know what to do. Should they give her money? If I
don’t, am I a racist? Is this real? What should we do? I sat
fascinated, watching these audience members literally confronted by the
drama--would they participate or not?
Later
in the play, we learn that Rosa Parks did not just have a hard day at work, as
the legend goes, but that her moment was specifically crafted because she was an
acceptable candidate to go into court. That Martin Luther King Jr. was
chosen to lead the bus boycott, not because he was famous, but because he was a
new minister in town and could leave quickly if things got out of hand. That
JoAnn Robinson, President of the Women's Political Council in Montgomery,
sneaked into Alabama State College at midnight, and mimeographed thousands of
leaflets publicizing the bus boycott getting the word out in less than one day.
We are shocked to learn that the boycott demanded not the right to sit
anywhere. Rather, with a successful boycott blacks would be able to board
from the back of the bus and move forward as they sat down until there were no
more seats; whites would board from the front. We learn that one of the
other demands was simply that the bus drivers had to be courteous to all
patrons. Claudette, far from becoming a hero, was shunned by her community, most
likely because of a pregnancy due to a unknown rape by a man in her community,
and had to drop out of school to take care of her baby. Finally, we
discover that because of Claudette’s testimony before the Supreme Court, the
Court ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Awele is both performer and playwright. Meticulous research went into the
crafting of this piece, including the integration of primary sources like
newspaper articles, court transcripts, memoirs, as well as interviews with
historical figures, and interpretive histories of the events. She has
further contextualized these "facts" (and believe me, the performance
teaches more historical facts in an hour than any teacher could) by focusing on
her educational objective: critical thinking. She wants her audiences to
be, not passive receivers of the facts, but active participants in interpreting
them, "critical listeners" and "critical thinkers." And
her play, and the theoretical grounding in historiography, works. Claudette
states:
"That day, March 2, 1955, when I
refused to give up that bus seat, I knew I could get arrested. The bus
driver and the police thought it was about a bus seat. It wasn't. It was
about Jim Crow. It was about discrimination and racism. It was a
whole lot of things -- the way life was. It was about changin' thangs, not
stayin' in your place'. I refused to be a silent witness. I didn't
want to participate that way."
After the applause subsides, Awele emerges
from the wings, this time in modern dress. She perches herself on the end
of the stage, sits down, and addresses the middle schoolers as herself. Her
regular voice has no accent, and sounds completely different than anything we
heard in the play. She is comfortable and committed. She asks the
audience to think about four questions and turn to their neighbors and discuss
for two minutes:
1) What makes this interesting or unique in having this story told this way?
2) What new information are you hearing about this moment in history?
3) What is disturbing or challenging about this history?
4) What questions do you have (for any of the characters, for me--researcher
or performing artist, this period in history, and the textbook industry...)?
The discussion that she leads is brief. This is a school, after all, and
these kids must get back to class, to their "real" work. But in
the discussion, Awele is able to make some further points--that racism is not
just a historical issue, that these things happen still, and that these audience
members, no matter how young, can do something about it. She talks openly with
them, and she is aware that she is, for some, the first black person that these
children have talked with. She reinforces the fact that her performance
focused on women, and she discusses her reasons for that. When someone
brings up sexism in the school, she capably draws parallels and asks more about
it. And when the young people repeatedly ask, “Why didn’t we know
about this?” She positively informs them that they do now, that history
is not just facts-history is who is doing the telling (!)--and that they can
make a difference. The kids file out of the auditorium as quietly as any
500 children that I have ever seen. I believe they were thinking about
what they saw.
I was shocked to find out that this was
Awele’s final performance of a 3 week tour, that she had already performed the
piece earlier in the day for high school audiences, and that the day before, she
had done a three hour in-service for teachers. I would have been
exhausted--Awele was clearly ready for more, and I had the great good fortune to
drive her to the airport and get to know her and her work a bit. It was a
fascinating and exhilarating discussion, and I vowed to bring her back to
perform Rage for my university
community.
Rage Is Not
A 1-Day Thing reminded me that young people need and want challenging
theatre, and that most often, they don’t get it. And that if we all worked for
social justice like Awele Makeba, who is out in the schools and community
centers doing this work, the world would be a better place.
For more information: www.awele.com
For a wonderful discussion of the play see "Holt Uncensored #210."
Write to
holtuncensored@topica.com or www.holtuncensored.com
Karen Libman is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University. She
is the former Editor of STAGE of the Art.
Awele Makeba: A Chance to Teach Critical Thinking -
Part I http://www.holtuncensored.com/members/column210.html
Part II
http://www.holtuncensored.com/members/column211.html
by Pat Holt, Former Book Review Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
