No sooner had the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Southern Writers' Project's Festival of New Plays (May 16-18, 2000) ended than two entered the 2008-2009 ASF season line-up: Bear Country and The Furniture of Home. Both were commissioned by ASF and received staged readings, along with three other dramas, one with music. All SWP plays concern Southern topics as well as African-American issues in general, presented by Southern and Black writers.
The opening event of the Festival, "Nothing But a Winner" featured a slide-illustrated speech by Ken Gaddy of the Bear Bryant Museum of Tuscaloosa about its subject.
Preparing for a staged reading of Bear Country, Gaddy traced the career of Alabama's legendary Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, including his time in Arkansas, the U. S. Navy (WW II), and Texas A & M, before making the U. of Alabama "his." Samples of and references to Museum holdings included pictures, charts, letters, awards and citations, film, a Time cover. Supplementing Gaddy's notes about Bryant's work with great players like Pat Trammel and Joe Namath, alumni of the Bear's various winning teams were on hand to share memories.
First of the five plays formally read in ASF's Octagon Theater, Michael Vigilant's Bear Country began with Paul Bryant (Rodney Clark) speaking from atop the kind of Tower he had built from which to direct his players. He reminisces about his life on and off the job, explains or defends his professional strategies and actions, comments on opponents and friends -- punctuated with lessons he gave and learned. He relives a few crises: an investigation involving betting on games, a crossroads in his coaching (25 years in college football, with a chance to go to the pros), charges of racism in selecting his teams.
Interspersed with the lead narration are radio and TV announcements, sportscasts, and voices or appearances of players, writers, other coaches, an attorney, a professional expert.
The racial issue seems to boil down to a (not completely satisfying) notion that what happened was a matter of the times and owing to Alabama's political leadership.
As yet the "play" is not so much a drama as an oral interpretation of a biography. Certainly of regional interest, it should serve to bring new audiences to ASF, which seems to be the organization's aim. Geoffrey Sherman, Producing Artistic Director of ASF, directed.
Pat Cunningham Devoto and Joanne Cunningham Walker's My Last Days as Roy Rogers, adapted from Devoto's novel, was also last of the first day of full plays. Read at neighboring Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, it concerns 10-year-old Tab Rutland (read by Cory Colemant), who adores Roy Rogers movies, and her "brown" friend Maudie May (Taylor Flowers) in the early 1950s. Polio having broken out, their small town's theaters and other public places are closed, so the girls set out for adventure elsewhere. They discover a theft, Tab learns about racial discrimination, people in the girls' town struggle with fears of disease. This summer, the girls come of age. (Devoto was inspired by fears when AIDS was first discovered, and her mother told her that the panic was comparable to that over polio.)
The reading, directed by Diana Van Fossen, was followed by the usual audience feedback, then a return to ASF for 10-minute, late-night readings.
Presented in the Shakespeare Garden: Titus Andronicus: The Kindergarten Class of Woodside Elementary Proudly Presents by Mimi Jeffries; Perfect Ending by Evelyn Jean Pine; The Kiss and also The Prodigal Cow by Mark Harvey Levine.
Winning short plays from the 2007 Young Southern Writers' Project led readings on Saturday, May 17. In ASF's large Rehearsal Hall A, We Learn from Our Mistakes by Angela Marlow was directed by Sarah Felder, as were Misty Motes' The Trees Change Color and Johnna Dominguez' s A Means of Our Deliverance.
Strongest of the SWP new plays read, The Furniture of Home, was directed by Nancy Rominger, ASF Associate Director, who also commands the entire Project. For the title, Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder uses a reference from W. H. Auden's poem "September 11, 1939" which also contains the famous line, "We must love one another or die." It becomes a central message of the play, set in Bayou LaBatre, coastal Alabama, after Katrina.
Dottie (Greta Lambert), a widow of only three months, keeps her granddaugher Kendall (Lori Prince), 16, in what little structurally remains of her home. Built by Dottie's shrimper husband on the waterfront, it seems better these summer days than their hot trailer and allows Kendall to collect and dry off over 300 family photos the storm sent floating in. Not only is she trying to get money to join her mother, supposedly dealing at a Biloxi casino, but Kendall's met a Nam vet (Moses Villarama) she could pay to drive her. Dottie's friends are dying off, or selling the few shrimp boats left, or resettling with relatives elsewhere.
Cleaning up is a Herculean task and developers hover throughout the bayou. Dottie's old love, Butch (Paul Hopper), visits for a night and, she hopes, will help her when a pro-sellout City Council meets. The challenges Dottie faces epitomize the outside forces that threaten families and communities after the storm.
Though too short, The Furniture of Home treats a family and a community's specific concerns as emblematic of universal contemporary problems. Characterizations are strong. Wilder's command of regional speech and dramatic metaphor recalls that of her award-winning Gee's Bend, SWP-developed and "read" two years ago, then world premiered by ASF in 2007. (After several regional productions, it is now being handled by Samuel French, Wilder told me. She welcomes being freed from "business arrangements" to finish work on her new play for its premiere, March 2009, at ASF).
A Saturday the 17th after-lunch Event was a speech by Pearl Cleage, publicized to be about playwriting. Instead, the popular writer, having been "away from theater for a few years, "basically read from her new novel, "Seen It All and Done the Rest." She said she followed her thoughts about how it feels to be African-American at this moment and wanted to see if she could write a good novel with a 50 year old black woman at its center. (It begins with that American in Amsterdam.) Fiction writing she found "a different, more solitary process" than playwriting, which "after the first script...is collaborative," especially with those involved in production. A book signing followed Cleage's "speech."
Preparations, about five African-American sisters coming together for an annual church lawn party at Mt. Vernon, Alabama, in 1937, by Jeffrey L. Chastang, employed the most actors for the longest reading. Though conflicts among the sisters dominate the action, their father emerges as a centrally important figure in their past as it affects them today. On the spot they grapple with other men in their lives, making decisions about future changes.
The play is presently overly complex, perhaps because it involves too many characters and their problems and too equally. It's helped by effective doses of humor. Janet Cleveland directed, and dramaturg Georgette Norman conducted a wide-ranging feedback session.
The evening of the 17th brought an included full production: SWP-developed Rocket City by Mark Saltzman. (See my review in Total Theater's Criticopia, Regional section.) An open-air poetry slam, "Respect the Mik," featured as host Sharrif Simmons, recording artist.
A musical reading of Nobody by Richard Aellen on Sunday morning, brought the SWP Festival to a close. Based on the lives of Bert Williams and George Warren, history making early 20th century African-American entertainers, the play stresses the irony of their overcoming racial barriers by playing stereotypes. From 1895, when they get hired for a "coon act" up to beyond George's death, Bertis was conflicted by his desire to be a real actor of quality dramatic roles. This and George's playing around while ready to do any act for money and fame strains their relationship, both personally and professionally.
Directed by Tim Edward Rhoze with musical direction by Brett Rominger, the play features songs and routines by Bert (taking advantage at SWP of James Bowen's fine vocal talents as well as acting) and George (Ronn K. Smith) along with his wife Ada Walker (Mildred Langford) who stood in for him in later days and tolerated his affair with Eva Tanguay (Hollis McCarthy), the "I Don't Care Girl. Bert's wife Lottie (Casaundra Freeman) gives personal solace to him throughout.
Minstrel figures in the background provide ironic songs and patter along with historical and scene-setting commentary.
A poignant and informative musical play, Nobody, bears the name of Bert Williams' popular stage character. The script could stand cutting, particularly of the team's squabbles over their material and of Bert with an obviously symbolic model boat. But ASF/SWP shouldn't let this play get away.
coach Bear Bryant
