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Community Performance Inc.

October 15, 2008

Complete computer meltdown has kept me from posting regular blogs. But I think I’ve got the problem cured. So, to catch up, I’ll post several that I was unable to post earlier.

As I’m getting ready to leave swamp gravy, several things strike me about this year’s production. First, is how timely it is. It’s set during the great depression. Not this one, but the last one. The show starts out with a man looking for work, talking about when the banks closed in Kessler. About people losing everythign they had. He’s confronted by a man who tells him he lost everything. The man says “So did I” How much did you lose, he asked. And the man says “I had three dollars and forty seven cents in that bank. The fella tells him “You ain’t lost nothin.” And the man says, “No, I lost everything I had.” And kept moving on. He goes on to speak about how the rich people got poorer, but they still aint poor like him, they still walk around like they have the pwer because they do, they still have the names everyone is afraid of. And that the real damage done to the regular folks of this countrywasn’t so much the loss of money, but the loss of hope. “I can do without money, did so most of my life, but how do I do without hope”. The show opened just a week after AIG failed, and 2 weeks after Lehman Brothers went under.
(Insert here- as I post this piece, written a couple of weeks ago, the stock market plunged almost a thousand points.)
The play start out without hope, so of course, the play is about hope.
The other thing that struck me about this play was a particular story. I really do love all of the stories in this play, and I had plenty of transcripts ot choose from for this play. But this one story in particular I’m thinking of wasn’t even in the first draft of the play. I wrote it after the first draft of the play had been read publicly. And though it wasn’t one of the original stories that moved me , it becamse one of the drarest to me in this play. In that small page and a half long scene sits the whole reason for doing this work. It’s a microcosm of community performance. The scene is called “Ordinary Folks”. In it, the character who is with the WPA’s Federal Writer’s Program has a list of people she’s supposed to interview for the WPA’s folk lore project. But when she arrives, with the guidance of an older resident, the WPA writer starts to go to some people other than those on her list of interview subjects. At the beginning of this scene, a woman exclaims to the WPA writer that she’s nothing special, just an ordinary person. She talks with the WPA person a while, holding her nephew’s hand. As she talks about how ordinary her life is, she remembers, that her great grandfather came to Colquitt on a covered wagon with everything he owned, and was there for the founding of the town. The nephew, who’s hand she is holding, would one day become Georgia’s Lt. Governor, Peter Zack Geer. I can’t tell you how many interivews I’ve had with people that start out the same way, not just in Colquitt, but around the country- around the world- it was the same in Rio, and London and Edinburgh. Almost all of them start out by saying “My family, oh, we’re just ordinary folks, there isn’t anything special about us.” And it’s that, exactly that, which makes this work so delicious- as they then go on to spill forth a story, profound and beautiful, full of wisdom and grace, about how to live in this world and how they made it this far. The extraordinary stories of ordinary people. I know that as I am called in to do other projects, this scene can be used to illustrate why it is we do this work--how it transforms a community or an individual- when it recognizes it is more than it believes it is. And perhaps this story is so dear to me because I come from Community Performance, and the same thing happened to me. An ordinary person who, in doing community performance, recognized there may be something more to me than I saw in myself.

   

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