Lipscomb, Fisk sponsor world premiere of civil rights play
Janel Shoun |
Today’s Nashvillians may not be aware that their city was a major player in the civil rights movement, but historians know better. Many have dubbed Nashville the “university of nonviolence,” where future civil rights leaders learned and developed nonviolent protest methods such as sit-ins.
Beginning Feb. 2 and throughout Black History Month, Ordinary Heroes, a play written and produced by the Actors Bridge Ensemble and Amun Ra Theatre, will offer audience members from Nashville and throughout the region the opportunity to learn about the city’s critical role in the civil rights era. The play, which is based on first-hand accounts of ordinary citizens who lived through those tumultuous times, will be performed Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m., at Fisk Memorial Chapel, 1000 17th Ave. North. Cost is $15.
Tickets are available by logging on to http://ordinaryheroesplay.com or by e-mailing actorsbridge@comcast.net.
Ordinary Heroes, written by Amun Ra founder jeff obafemi carr with Actors Bridge founder Vali Forrister, is based on oral histories from the Nashville Public Library and interviews the writers conducted with eyewitnesses to the events of the 1950s and 60s. A world premier production, the play is funded by a Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission creation grant and is sponsored by Lipscomb University and the Fisk University Race Relations Institute.
While Nashville was the training ground for many of the civil rights movement’s leaders, such as James Lawson, C.T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette, Diane Nash, John Lewis and James Bevel, Ordinary Heroes focuses on the “foot soldiers” of the movement who recall events through monologues, narrative, poetry, music and dramatizations, Forrister said. The play is designed to “tell the stories behind the stories,” carr added.
The play depicts a wide range of life experiences, from a mother's private worries about the lessons she teaches her son through her own compliance to depictions of the verbal and physical abuse students endured during the sit-ins at Nashville lunch counters.
Forrister was first inspired to create Ordinary Heroes after reading The Children, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam, a young reporter at The Tennessean during the civil rights era. The book recounts Nashville’s pivotal role in the birth of the nationwide movement beginning with James Lawson, an African American divinity student who studied under Mahatma Gandhi and later came to Vanderbilt Divinity School. There, he began teaching workshops to Nashville's African American youth to equip them for the equal-rights struggle.
When she first read the book, “I was shocked,” Forrister said. “I wasn’t aware of that aspect of Nashville’s history. As a kid I was intrigued with the civil right movement, but I hadn’t been taught any of this. And I was dismayed. So, I contacted jeff (cq) and said that someone should tell this story. I asked him if Amun Ra would collaborate with Actors Bridge to create a theatre piece about Nashville’s legacy in the movement.”
“I was personally drawn to the perspectives of people whose stories you couldn’t find in history books--the people I heard the older cats talking about when I was waiting in the barber shop growing up or sitting on my neighbor’s porch in South Nashville,” carr said of the creation process. “In writing this play, I have discovered so much about the power of the human spirit to overcome obstacles, and that has made my life more complete.”
carr, who recently appeared in the movie The Second Chance with Michael W. Smith, and Forrister, who co-founded Actors Bridge in 1996, began conducting interviews two years ago along with a research team that included Midori Lockett and Bill Feehely.
Actors Bridge Ensemble was founded in 1996 by Bill Feehely and Vali Forrister. It is an actor training program and professional theatre company dedicated to creating progressive, provocative productions. It is a group of artists committed to the ensemble principle, and serves as an incubator for new theatrical works.
Amun Ra Theatre was first conceived in the summer of 1998 by the founding Artistic Director jeff obafemi carr. It is a performing arts ensemble dedicated to giving voice to all the people not normally in the mainstream of the theater community – the playwrights, the musicians, the poets, and the dancers of color in the region.
The Fisk University Race Relations Institute strives to heighten awareness among all people about the divisive and insidious nature of racism.