Taking Action: Teaching Participatory Community-based Theater – Kate Mendeloff

Kate Mendeloff

Kate Mendeloff, with social scientist Charlie Bright, conducts The Detroit Oral History Project at the University of Michigan Residential College in Ann Arbor. Units have included "Emerging Voices: Coming of Age in the City" (Winter Term 2000) and "Emerging Voices: Stories from Southwest Detroit" (Winter Term 2001). Mendeloff answers the interview questions in general terms, based on her experience with the project.

Kate Mendeloff: This team-taught course combined historical examination of the city of Detroit, Michigan, with the outreach process of interviewing elders and other residents of the city. The students shared significant stories around several time periods or themes and they worked together to create several performance pieces. These ultimately became the basis for new scripts performed by local Detroit theater companies to help celebrate the city's 300th birthday. The course was funded in some part by the Arts of Citizenship office at the University of Michigan, which helped purchase tape recorders and tapes for the interview process, and which paid the salary of a project coordinator to arrange interviews and workshops in Detroit. 

The two professors brought a great deal of expertise to their collaboration on this course. Charlie Bright is a historian who has done extensive research into the history of the auto industry and the United Auto Workers union. He has also researched and written on the subject of America's prison system, and Jackson Prison in particular. Kate Mendeloff worked with an oral-history theater group in Baltimore, Maryland, and was Artistic Director of Tale Spinners theater in San Francisco. During the five years of her tenure there, the oral-history playwright's group developed and produced over 30 new scripts on Bay Area history and issues.

The first year of the class was focused on coming-of-age stories from Detroit residents from all areas of the city. Out of these interviews emerged two main areas of interest, stories of the 1967 riot, which evolved into a series of radio plays, and stories of the Paradise Valley neighborhood, which was the center of the black community of the 1930s and 40s. Destroyed by the freeways, this area had been the center of black commercial and cultural life and although it was a de-facto segregated neighborhood, it offered a strong and supportive base for Detroit's black families.

These stories were the basis of a musical play by Mosaic Youth theater, entitled 2001 Hastings Street, which has performed throughout the Detroit area. We helped coordinate additional interviews with the young performers, so that they could learn about the characters they were presenting. The play focused on a youth group based in Paradise Valley and presented the frustrations and aspirations of black youth in the war era. The most interesting part of this was the kind of dialogue it inspired in the cast about living in a segregated world, but a strong community that took pride in its identity, instead of the kind of fractured urban/ suburban entity that Detroit is today.

The class was so successful that Charlie and I ran a second version of it, focusing this time on a discreet neighborhood, Southwest Detroit. This is a largely working-class community, the Ford River Rouge plant is nearby. It had a huge influx of Mexican immigrants in the early '40s and there was a major repatriation effort, which sent many back. But recently there has been a second wave of immigration, and the neighborhood is coming back to life. We did a number of our interviews with seniors who had lived in the neighborhood all their lives but also with recent immigrants, and with youth enrolled in the G.E.D. program at La Sed, the Latino community agency. We were also lucky to have a project coordinator who was a Residential College alumnus, who had been doing community organizing in this neighborhood for several years and was bilingual.

The material we gleaned from our interviews was put together in a collage of monologues and scenes centered around the now-abandoned train station, which was the site of the repatriation effort, the soldiers going to WWII, and the recent gang wars. The play was presented at the Pablo Davis Senior Center and will be adapted by playwrights from the local Matrix theater company, which does community-based performances.

One of the side projects that came out of our work in Southwest Detroit is a video documentary of local artist and activist Pablo Davis, whose efforts led to the creation of the elder center where he lives. Pablo is a fascinating man with a long and brilliant career, but it started in Detroit when he came to see Diego Rivera paint the "Detroit Industry" murals at the DIA Museum. He stayed on to be Diego's assistant and it is his personal tour of the murals that we have captured on video. Pablo sees the mural as a visual representation of The Communist Manifesto, and his perspective on Diego and Edsel Ford is quite amazing. One of our students was inspired by Pablo to write a play, which we hope to actually perform in the museum next year.

As to the practical aspects of the course - I have boiled it down into some key phases. First, we told our own personal story of where we come from and how we are shaped by events in our own early lives- our personal coming of age stories.

The second year of the course treated this exercise differently. We did an improvisation exercise where the class broke into small groups and shared stories about a time when they were directly touched by political or historical events. The group chose one story to dramatize and show the class. Discussion followed on how different techniques were used to tell the story.

I also introduced the class to several Tale Spinner scripts, to one from Baltimore Voices about the steel mills, and examples of Anna Deavere Smith's work to further the discussion of oral history to theater performance. I also invited several playwrights to talk about their process in this kind of work. 

While we focused class time on these exercises and the guest lectures with a historical focus the class was assigned extensive reading about Detroit, from articles and books about the city's history. We also had guest lectures on aspects of that history and of present day issues in Detroit. We also had guest lectures on the process of interviewing by Abby Stewart, from the Women's Studies Program. 

For our most recent class on Southwest Detroit we took a field trip early on, went to the Museum to see the murals and hear Pablo speak about them, visited several local churches and met activists there and at La Sed Community Center. We had lunch at a local Mexican restaurant and then went to meet with the directors of the Matrix theater and saw evidence of their recent projects and brainstormed about ours. 

The next phase focused on interviewing, and each student chose to meet with one or several residents and do several interviews. That material was shared at our weekly three-hour class meeting, and eventually was edited and performed by the students as their mid-term project. These monologues were the start of our script-development process, and the concept of the train station as the unifying image came right out of the stories we heard. The connections with local people continued on a weekly or biweekly basis and we used class time to develop the play. We divided the class each week to work with Kate in Ann Arbor, or go in to work with the director at Matrix theater in Detroit. The final version of the script was workshopped at the senior center with a number of our "characters" in the audience.

Since we had the opportunity to do this course twice, we had a much easier time the second time around. What made the difference is that we identified the neighborhood more specifically, and we got our project coordinator involved much earlier, so that we were ready to do interviews right at the start of the course.

The tour of the neighborhood at the outset was enormously helpful. A number of the interview sources came from people we met that day, in fact several of our "tour guides" provided stories themselves. We had an advantage, in that the Residential College has an extremely strong Spanish program, so students were able to do bilingual interviews. And one of the students was from the Southwest neighborhood! 

I would stress that the combination of providing strong historical background, having students have personal experience with the process of interviewing, telling one's one story and confronting how to dramatize it, and being introduced to the community in an informal way, all contributed to their ease with the interview process and the evolution of oral history to performance.

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Original CAN/API publication: September 2001