Nine Eleven, Fear and Hand Me Down Shoes

Refugees at the Constantinople relief center in "Hand me Down Shoes." (Photo courtesy of Yoder Preservation Trust.)

From November 1920 to January 1922, Joe and Alice Brunk were separated by thousands of miles while he did refugee relief work in Constantinople on behalf of the Mennonite Central Committee and she stayed home in Virginia, taking care of the farm and family. It was during this time that the British and French overthrew the Ottoman Empire, making the ruling Sultanate a prisoner in his own land. This was the first time Muslim populations in the Middle East came under non-Muslim rule, the beginning of an era that militant Islamists consider a humiliation of Islam. These were the events spoken about by Osama bin Laden in November 2001.

The letters Joe and Alice wrote to each other every week during their separation were the basis for "Hand Me Down Shoes," a new musical community-history play by the Mennonite community of Newport News, Va., which ran February 22 to March 17, 2002. The new "folk opera" was presented as the community's response to the events of 9/11. Staged in Yoder Barn by Yoder Preservation Trust and Community Performance Inc. (CPI), written by Jo Carson and performed by 93 community members telling their own stories, the play examined what it means to be a refugee, who can afford to be hoppin’ mad about it and how the emotions of fear and safety play out in everyday existence. It fiercely underscored family and community as essential to a life without fear; these also happen to be basic Mennonite values.

This is the third community play by this collaborative group, and it was more powerfully political than the others. It included the poignant and horrifying stories of refugees from the turmoil of the Russian revolution, their fall from the upper classes and the ravages of living with terror. The grating poverty and humiliation of life in wartime is reflected in the interactions Joe has with the refugees at his relief center, where he hands out used clothing donated by the people back home. This genuinely fearful condition is compared, through simultaneous scenes, with life in Virginia, where Alice and her children wait for Joe to come back, and other community members remember the details of their lives at home during other wartimes.

The metaphor of hand-me-down shoes plays out in both cases. At home, the Mennonites are thrifty people who take joy in reusing everything till it is used up. When the formerly rich refugees spit on second-hand clothes and reject shoes worn by others, Joe tells them, "I like hand-me-down shoes. I like them, and I like the idea of them. … It is the tradition I come from, the people I know and love wear hand-me-downs, and they rebuild and use things again and again. …This is no shame, it is pure and simple good use." And the refugees learn to value what they have received.

Vice-versa, the Virginians, with whom Alice shares Joe’s letters, learn from his tales about real fear and hardship. One domestic story deals with nearby Mulberry Island, where people who came to live there as refugees from one war were uprooted and displaced by another when the military turned it into a bombing test range. The citizens are, literally, "hoppin’ mad," and are reprimanded by a fellow Mennonite: "You’ve lost a home and that is hard, but you do not fear for your life or well being, that’s why you can afford to be hoppin’ mad."

In a seminal scene, Alice’s little boy Ivan is afraid to go outside the house because there’s a bear in the woods that "eats people that don’t have daddies." Alice comforts him in her lap and reminds him of all the things he has that make him safe, including a warm bed, family and friends who love him -- and a pair of shoes, even if they are his cousin’s hand-me-downs. "And that is not worth worrying about, is it?"

The central problem of both communities, says the play, is fear. In the voice of a refugee, the play declares that to "be done with fear" you must stop feeding it. "I think something in this world is hungry for fear. I think something feeds on fear or there would not be so much of it. … I want to be able to feel what I need to feel for what is past, and then let sadness and anger go, and not have that residue still in my heart. This life is not about justice, it is about things I have to learn, and the lesson is to let go of fear and those emotions that go by other names, but are also fear. Anger. Hurt. All those. They are only other names for fear." The play ends with the realization that the antidote to fear is love.

The staging is a potent presence in each of these plays. Yoder Barn is a narrow, truss-bowed structure that soars like a Gothic cathedral, with free access up and down its 140-foot length. There is a stage at one end, where Alice and Joe were installed in their separate lives, backed by huge barn doors that opened, letting in refugees to Joe’s relief center. There is a tall loft at the other end, and the audience sits stadium-style on risers facing the central aisle, where much of the action takes place. In this case, a large farm wagon was pulled up and down the center space from loft to stage, standing in for the ships that took Joe across the seas and a Russian refugee family to the U.S., and for the boat that transported a displaced American family to Mulberry Island. This kind of staging really keeps the performance moving. Audience members can buy a special ticket to stand on the floor among the actors, and it’s a chance I would never pass up. It’s especially electrifying to be amongst them when they harmonize on the lovely songs written by Sally Rogers and directed by Michael Park, both locals.

It would take thousands of words to describe what goes into one of these productions and the way it tugs at the heart. Every time I see one of CPI’s plays I have the solid feeling that this is a new American popular theater, that it is a good thing to put ordinary people on the stage and pack the house with audiences who care deeply about what the play says and who is doing it. John David Yoder, the paterfamilias of this clan (who, by the way, has been picking up most of the tab for this theater), tells me that every time he sees a performance in his barn, whether it’s by his neighbors like this one, or an evening with the local symphony, he weeps. He remembers when the barn was built in 1935 to hold his father’s cattle and hay, and when it was moved in 1995 to make way for a vast shopping center. He said he knew it had to be saved. He just didn’t know why until now.

This same sentiment is vigorously embraced by everyone involved with these productions. It’s hard to imagine art that has a more powerful impact on its participants and its audience. In this play there are several scenes involving a butcher who brings flowers to the grave of a woman who was nice to him and might have been his wife if she hadn’t died young. He says there won’t be anyone left to put flowers on his grave, and, though he is not a Mennonite, he wishes he could be buried next to her. His wish was honored and he does lie beside her in the local graveyard. I have heard that after the last performance of this play, the whole cast and crew, 100 strong, went to the cemetery and smothered the two graves with fresh daffodils, and the children ran among the stones calling out names of the dead, which they recognized from being in these plays. I can barely imagine what it would be like to have this wonderful experience in my childhood. Maybe I wouldn’t have roamed so far from home.

A few words must be said about this unique artistic team, Community Performance Inc. It all began when director Richard Owen Geer and writer Jo Carson worked with a whole town in south Georgia to create "Swamp Gravy." Since then, Geer gathers artists from all over the country to go to work when CPI is called in to help a community create its own play. Geer and choreographer Iega Jeff are based in Chicago, Jo Carson lives in Tennessee, playwright and director Jules Corriere lives in Newport News, set designer Joe Varga is based in Madison, Wisc., and lighting designer Brackley Frayer hails from Las Vegas. Together they have worked with hundreds and hundreds of first-time performers in both urban and rural communities in Chicago, Newport News, Tennessee, Colorado, South Carolina and Florida.

The presence of these professional artists in this scenario is essential. They have perfected a method of gleaning community stories and creating something fascinating, funny, scary and moving on the stage. I know many have the opinion that the real function of such artists is to teach communities how to complete this process without their help, and to leave a functioning theater behind when the project is over. But I don’t think this is always possible. I attended a play by a community who let the CPI artists go in the middle of their process to save money, and the resulting production had all the charm of a junior-high-school talent show. While there may be real talent in a community — and there is stunning musical talent among the Mennonites — this work requires intensely complex theater skills and a deeply held philosophy that honors art of, by and for the people. Watching this process has me more convinced than ever that society really does need artists, and always will.

Coming up from CPI: Scrap Mettle SOUL presents "The Whole World Gets Well" in Chicago in April, and Boogaloo Broadcasting Company presents "Turn the Wash Pot Down" in Union, S.C. in July, both written by Jules Corriere. Extensive information about the artists and their working method is available on their excellent Web site. The CAN archive contains a review of "Cross Tides" at Yoder Barn, and an interview with writer Jo Carson.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2002