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Community Performance Inc.

June 03, 2008

Barbara said she wanted time for a meeting. She arrived at rehearsal with a slim middleaged woman whom she introduced as Peggy Hunter Haley, the daughter of the man who was shot. My daddy did not die in vain, Peggy told Jules and me, because of his death we have representation on the city council and the police force. However you want to tell the story, she said, is fine with me.

Barbara has no affect whatsoever. She tries to speak a little louder when she is in a group than when she is alone. But her voice is always even, and quite soft. She stood simply with her arms at her side before an array of old photos and newspaper clippings of the time before. The largest item was a large, original pen drawing of the old school, complete with two outhouses. The man who had made the drawings was not an artist, but he remembered how glass and wood and height made the simple two story school. The corner of a yellowed newspaper, faded photographs, a child-like drawing of a children's school. Barbara told us the story the events we depicted. She said, the ones she wanted to hear this were not yet there.

Barbara had asked for the meeting to discuss a problem, not a race problem she told me. And the people she wanted to address were not there. I understood. Lynetta and Bobby are teens who don't know the impact or import of what they speak. This lesson is for them. Ah, they arrive. Perhaps this will help them with the weight of the story which the two of them tell.

We rehearsed the new scene which Jules had written, really the new center to the existing scene. We could only rough it in, but we checked in when we were done and both blacks and whites approved. Lines have to be memorized. Fortunately, those same teen brains that don't carry the gravitas of experience, can hold lots of new lines. They'll be memorized tomorrow night.

   

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