New Day Dawning
‘Sundown Town’ remembers dark times
Posted: January 28, 2011 at 4:54 a.m.
Kyle Kellams report
In a forum on Jan. 18, Kyle Kellams of KUAF talked about "Sundown Town" with T2 founder Bob Ford, playwright Kevin Cohea, director Kevin Fox, Brian Hembree of 3 Penny Acre and Charles Robinson of the University of Arkansas. This is some of the discussion from kuaf.com.
‘Sundown Town’
WHEN — 7:30 p.m. Feb. 4; 2 & 7:30 p.m. Feb. 5; 2 p.m. Feb. 6; again Feb. 10-13; and Feb. 17-20
WHERE — Nadine Baum Studios across from the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville
COST — $22-$24 plus 30 Under 30 tickets at $10
INFO — 571-2728
BONUSES —
“Leave Town and Never Return: Racial Cleansing in Arkansas” — With Guy Lancaster, 7 p.m. Tuesday, Shiloh Museum in Springdale. Free. 750-8165.
3 Penny Acre in Concert — 7:30 p.m. Feb. 20, Nadine Baum Studios in Fayetteville. $10. 443-5600 or www.3pennyacre.com.
When Moses, a drifter, gets a job in Healing Springs, Ark., it causes quite a ruckus.
It’s 1918. Moses is black. And Healing Springs is a “sundown town,” where African Americans aren’t welcome — especially after dark but really, not at all.
“Sundown Town,” the TheatreSquared drama premiering Feb. 4, was intended to be a bluegrass musical, says playwright Kevin Cohea. But then he came across a turn-of-the-century promotional flyer for Siloam Springs — “a city of natural beauty” with “no malaria, no mosquitoes and no Negroes.”
Cohea, who teaches in Siloam Springs, was horrified — and intrigued.
“It was very hard to find historical research,” Cohea says. “It’s something that has been swept under the rug because people want to forget.”
The story Cohea wrote, combined with the bluegrass and gospel music that was the original inspiration, was “dynamite from a theatrical perspective,” says Bob Ford, one of the founders of TheatreSquared. “It’s so much of what we want to be about as a theater company.”
Two trial runs at T2’s New Play Festival have made “Sundown Town” more complex, with “new scenes, new relationships, new layers” added because of the workshops, Cohea says. But there’s also the extra element of 3 Penny Acre. “Putting the live music of a highly accomplished ensemble into the mix is enormous,” says Ford. “It’s magical.”
It’s during a barn dance, with 3 Penny Acre playing in the hayloft, that the ugly secrets of Healing Springs start to come out. The actors say they shudder at the vitriolic “N” word, but racism isn’t the only prejudice explored in “Sundown Town.”
“I live in Chicago, and hate crimes are much more prevalent in the city than racially motivated violence,” says director Kevin Christopher Fox. “Another part of our experience is discrimination against the massive immigrant population ... and against the gay population. We’ve brought those issues into the conversation because for some of us they’re more common than racial discrimination.
“And Kevin (Cohea) wants us to think about the juxtaposition of loving people with good hearts who for some reason also have the conviction that entire groups are going to hell,” Fox adds, revealing a plotline about the pillar of the church who blames lust for her murderous actions. “A lot of different kinds of discrimination have a voice.”
There are even constraints on the freedom of Annie, the girl who falls in love with Moses. As a single woman in 1918, her options are limited. She envies Moses’ freedom as a man, while naively failing to understand the limitations of being African American.
The actors playing Annie and Moses — Halley Mayo, who grew up in Northwest Arkansas, and Alex West, from Michigan — echo the spirit of hope that the playwright, director, actors and theater company want playgoers to feel at the end of the show.
“I think the fact that Alex is the only African American in the play signifies a lot,” West says. “You hear so many stories about how African Americans feel alone all the time, not only in their community but segregated from society because they’re black. Moses is in a situation where he’s alienated from everything. That’s a very powerful part of the story.
“I hope the audience would think about their relationship with strangers,” West says, “and how they treat people who aren’t like themselves.”
“All I can say is that I’m hopeful that people take from (the play) what Cohea is trying to say,” says Mayo. “We’ve taken these strides to eliminate the hate amongst us, but we still have a long way to go.”
“Sundown Town” is recommended for ages 13 and older.
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I'll start. I remember clearly when I learned that black and white were different. It was when the teachers took the white girls aside before our sixth grade dance — and told us not to dance with the black boys. "They can dance with the black girls." I knew that couldn't be right.
Posted by: BBMartin
January 28, 2011 at 10:31 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
I grew up in the deep South near a town that sounds very much like the town depicted in the play. I went to a school where white children and African American children played happily with Hispanic children and Laotian children. I couldn't understand why some of the grown-ups around me insisted on using the "n" word and didn't understand why they treated people differently.
In second grade my son came home and told me all about this cute girl he met at school. He described her long brown hair, her cute smile, that she was hilarious and loved Pokemon as much as he did. When I finally met her, I was so proud to find out that she was in fact African American, but he never thought to make that distinction when describing her. I hope that's a sign of greater things to come.
Posted by: jmcclory
January 28, 2011 at 4:25 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
I spent my early years on military bases with people from all cultures and walks of life. I was six when we moved to Yellville, Arkansas, and I remember the sundown sign at the edge of town. I remember asking my grandfather what it meant and was shocked and confused as to why some people had to be gone by sundown. I had lived in a cocoon of prejudicial ignorance, the naivete of youth. I had no idea that some people were welcome and others weren't. That was my first exposure to racial prejudice. I am 45 years old--this happened in 1971. This "history" is not that far distant.
Posted by: BPD
January 28, 2011 at 4:32 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
When I was in sixth grade at Leverett Elementary (ca. 1971), there was one black student in our class--the only black student in the whole school, as I recall. Maybe that's why Mrs. Keesee had us study the word "prejudice" and write an essay about it. I wrote of frustration I felt with members of my family who used the N-word. Excerpts of our essays--anonymous excerpts, no student names were used--ended up in a NWA Times article, including my sentence about "wanting to hit my relatives over the head" when I heard them use the N-word. I was so excited and proud to see my essay quoted in the paper, yet I never told anybody, especially not anyone in my family, that it was my quote. I didn't have the courage to confront the issue. That's something I regret to this day.
Posted by: SCYoung
January 28, 2011 at 4:52 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Fayetteville’s 3 Penny Acre today performed its song about the Tulsa 1921 race riot live on KUAF 91.3 Public Radio. The singer/composer recalls not hearing much about the riot while in the Tulsa schools as a lad. In my somewhat earlier era there, I heard absolutely zero about it in the schools’ required city and state history courses. The history took awhile to resurface. See the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH_Nrw...
Posted by: yourman
January 28, 2011 at 5:33 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
At the forum at the Fayetteville Library the other day, the panelists were asked what they were taught about race in school. I suddenly realized I didn't remember. There were no children of any minority at my small NH school, and I have found that I'm often paralyzed by how to talk about race relations. What are the right words to use, how (or if) my conversations should change if I'm talking to a white person compared to a black person? This is why I love theater; we (the community) can discuss these scary and difficult things in context of what we are seeing on stage. I wonder if we are more honest with each other when talking about a play than we are talking about real life?
Posted by: jodibeznoska
January 31, 2011 at 2:08 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
My teenage years were spent in both Fayetteville, where I went to school, and Springdale where we attended church. Here are 2 stories of that time:
One day in the mid 1960s I accompanied my mother to the Springdale office were she had her taxes done-a business owned by a prominent man named Peevey who eventually went on to become sheriff.
On the main wall of this office was displayed a large poster picturing a gorilla and an African-American man, side by side. Between them was a list of common physical traits they were purported to share, like low forehead and IQ, strong animal smell and so on--very ugly stuff. Well, my eyeballs almost popped out as I gasped and called my mother over to see.
On the other side of the room sat 2 or 3 attractive secretaries who had put up on the wall behind them a large colorful poster of the famous and very handsomely buffed out black football player, Jim Brown. They smiled and winked at me as I read the handwritten caption...Some Monkey, huh?
A couple of years later my youth group at the Methodist church there in Springdale put on a play called 'The Cross and the Switchblade'-about racial tensions among young people in big cities. I guess that's why no one had objected to it- it wasn't about racial tension in small southern towns. When the time came and we seemed ready for the performance, our wonderful youth director that summer (blessed be Max Woodfin of Brinkley, Ark) thought we should invite all the other youth groups in the area, including the black church in Fayetteville. I suppose that would have been St. James. Well, maybe you can guess--the church elders said no way--we weren't allowed to invite any black folks. Not that any sane black person would have wanted to venture into Springdale in those days anyhow, it being another well-known sundown town.
Posted by: nwagal
February 7, 2011 at 4:59 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
To BPD: I'm not sure how you came up with the idea of a sundown sign in Yellville, but there was not one there. I drove through Yellville on may way to college starting in 1971 at least twice a month. I continue to drive through that town regularly. There has never been a sign like that in Yellville since that time. My wife moved to Yellville in the mid 1960s and graduated from Yellville-Summit High School in mid 1970s. She agrees. Wasn't such a sign.
Posted by: Caribu
February 8, 2011 at 11:36 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Here's another story from my southeastern Kansas childhood:
There was a new boy in school. We liked each other — never dated, but we were friends. He was on the football team and on this particular Friday, he actually got to play. When the game ended, I went down by the locker room to hug him and tell him congratulations.
My mama knew before I got home.
Yes, he was black.
Posted by: BBMartin
February 14, 2011 at 4:08 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
My wife is a black american and I am white. We live in Siloam Springs and can remember Katrina hitting the gulf and the displaced refugees moving to the Baptist Assembly ground right outside of town. Soon signs began erecting in downtown Siloam saying that the "people" needed to go home and they weren't welcome in their businesses. We have looked at the community we live in and how hospitable it will be for our 3 and 10 month old children as they enter the school system.
There have been numerous times the race of the POTUS has been spoken about as a reason he is unqualified to be in his position. We continue to look towards a day when all areas are more accepting and hospitable.
Posted by: T2Audience
February 22, 2011 at 6:02 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
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