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World Premiere Wisconsin premiere of I CARRY YOUR HEART WITH ME at Third Avenue PlayWorks.
1 May 2023

The Great Awakening: First Stage and Black Arts MKE Dream a New Tomorrow for Black America

Mike Fischer, for World Premiere Wisconsin
The Great Awakening: First Stage and Black Arts MKE Dream a New Tomorrow for Black America Image

History is what hurts
– Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

 

I. Remembering the Past

“Iris’s nightmares terrified her.”

That’s the first sentence in India Hill Brown’s The Forgotten Girl, a terrific YA novel featuring an 11-year-old girl for whom an innocent frolic in new-fallen snow unwittingly unearths a long forgotten and segregated cemetery. This country is full of them; in death as in life, Black Americans were kept separate and unequal.

First Stage Artistic Director Jeff Frank picked up Brown’s book at Milwaukee’s Niche Book Bar “and was immediately hooked.”

“It is a chilling ghost story set in the here and now but with a look back at how our history informs today,” Frank wrote me. “There is a powerful message about being heard, being acknowledged – about knowing that you matter,” he continued.

Playwright Idris Goodwin.

Long hoping to work with acclaimed playwright Idris Goodwin on a project, at a theater that’s now staged more than 75 world premieres, Frank approached Goodwin about adapting The Forgotten Girl; it will be given a full First Stage production next October.

In the interim, Goodwin and Frank were both on hand for last Wednesday night’s pre-production public reading, first of two First Stage entries in the World Premiere Wisconsin Festival. The audience feedback afterward echoed Iris’ own experience of learning about segregated burial grounds, in her native North Carolina and throughout the South.

“Half my family is from North Carolina, and I didn’t know this history,” said one audience member, a friend of mine who is among the biggest and most informed history geeks I know. “I’m a teacher, and I’ve not once thought about segregated graves,” said another.

Reflect on reactions like these, the next time a politician decries actually teaching the truth about our past to our kids. Doing so isn’t about being “woke.” It’s about waking up. For as Iris and her friend Daniel learn in The Forgotten Girl, burying the past simply hastens the return of the repressed, rising from the dead as hungry ghosts, feeding like vampires on our collective future.

Courtesy of First Stage.

Goodwin’s adaptation captures the heart of Brown’s book, which draws parallels between the disappearance and death of Avery – a girl who’d died at Iris’s age – and the microaggressions through which Iris herself is continually “forgotten” by white teachers and administrators sending the message that even if she works twice as hard, she’ll only ever get half as far.

As Iris learns, the way forward requires first traveling backward.

It’s no accident that the long-buried forgotten girl whose story Iris explores had died in 1956, as the bus boycott raged in Montgomery (the same boycott that is being systematically erased in new Florida social studies textbooks pretending to discuss Rosa Parks).

It’s no accident that Avery was one of nine students who’d integrated the formerly all-white middle school she and Daniel attend; Brown hereby pays homage to the Little Rock Nine.

And it’s no accident that Daniel’s grandmother, reluctantly dredging up old memories, mentions that “right here in North Carolina,” the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins changed history at a Woolworth’s lunch counter.

“The past is never dead,” Faulkner once said. “It’s not even past.” Or as Daniel’s grandmother says, “we’ve come so far, but still have a long way to go.”

How might Iris herself move forward, awakening from History’s nightmare?

As she insists to Daniel, doing so requires that they “dig deeper” – and not, as the more risk-averse Daniel prefers, just from the safety of a library.

In Brown’s book and Goodwin’s script, the history told through a school library is only ever partial; marginalized voices are silenced there, too. To hear and truly absorb that forgotten history, we need more stories like The Forgotten Girl, on our shelves and on our stages, so that silenced voices can be heard and remembered.

Iris’s final thought, and the final words of Brown’s book?

“She’d always remember.”

From an opening nightmare to a closing commemoration: Remembering our long segregated and fragmented past, Iris rises from history’s nightmare, living a new day by laying the foundation for better stories.

A scene from ZURI’S CROWN, courtesy of Black Arts MKE.

 

II. Imagining The Future

I saw the first public performance of one such story on the morning after hearing The Forgotten Girl: at 11 am on Thursday, Black Arts MKE opened its one-weekend run of Zuri’s Crown – its entry in the WPW festival – with a student matinee that raised the roof in Wilson Theater at Vogel Hall.

I’ve been watching shows at Vogel for decades. I’ve never seen one that was met with so much high-octane enthusiasm. Joy. Love.

And why not?

This 80-minute musical adaptation of “Rapunzel” by Cynthia Cobb, Parrish Collier, and Sheri Williams Pannell celebrates all a community could be if its members felt free to love themselves – and, as a result, each other.

As I noted in a prior blog entry previewing Zuri’s Crown, its creators chose “Rapunzel” for their Black fairy tale redo so that they might focus attention on why, by the time Black girls reach Iris’ age, 90 percent of them have experienced discrimination based on their hair, a not-so-subtle way of telling them that they’re not beautiful because they’re not white.

From the top of the show, Cobb, Collier, and Pannell make clear that Zuri’s Crown won’t retell that sad and tired tale.

A spirited three-actor chorus invokes and then ditches the outdated and distancing “once upon a time” formula that whisks us to a far-off land of castles in which all-white royalty are too busy negotiating with all-white gods to worry about mere mortals.

A scene from ZURI’S CROWN, courtesy of Black Arts MKE.

No, we’re told, this story takes place in the here and now in Milwaukee; it won’t feature others’ stories but showcase our own (which is consistent with the whole concept of World Premiere Wisconsin, but I digress).

In this story, musical influences range from precolonial Africa to rap, with a heavy dose of the glorious, gospel-inflected soul of the 1970’s as well as R&B and straight-up blues.

Songs which we first hear as iconic rock-and-roll return as blues (a nod toward the cultural appropriation that consistently whitewashes Black music). Songs initially given simple introductions are later rearranged, birthing new and more textured inflections. A shift from major to minor in one reprised song envisioning a “loving family” underscores the tension baked into that song’s lyrics between being “safe” and being “free” in a world riven by violence and hate.

As we hear the music sing what we watch the story play out, we’re challenged to imagine how we might learn to mediate our differences, creating new harmonies from distinct styles so that we can dance into the future together with the same exuberant enthusiasm as the chorus.

Getting there isn’t any easier for Cameron Stampley’s 19-year-old Zuri than it was for Brown and Goodwin’s 11-year-old Iris.

Zuri’s name may mean “beautiful” in Swahili, but this Zuri initially has a hard time believing in herself – or loving her hair, living “a life of its own” and her crowning glory, if she could only truly see it.

Brian Crawford’s Ukweli helps her get there; with a name meaning “truth” in Swahili, one would expect nothing less. But Crawford ensures his character has a full dramatic arc; while he may never lie, the truth he speaks grows more confident and sure as he spends more time with Zuri. Keats had it right: beauty is truth, truth is beauty; together, they can bring the world together.

“Are these characters still alive?,” a young child asked Pannell during a post-show talkback. “They live in our hearts,” Pannell replied, suggesting all that’s possible if we’d heed what that oft-neglected organ is continually trying to tell us.

It’s because Zuri learns to listen to her heart that she flies free of her imprisoning and isolating tower, healing herself and joining Ukweli to remake the world.

Call it a fairy tale if you must. But as I walked into the promising sunlight of a Milwaukee spring day, what Zuri’s Crown suggested to me is that our dreams of a better tomorrow might actually come true, if we could but summon the courage to believe that they’re possible.

The author, with Festival Producer Michael Cotey and ZURI’S CROWN director and co-writer, Sheri Williams Pannell.

Meet Mike

Mike Fischer wrote theater and book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for fifteen years, serving as chief theater critic from 2009-18. A member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison, he also co-hosts Theater Forward, a bimonthly podcast. You can reach him directly at mjfischer1985@gmail.com.

Mike’s work as WPW’s Festival Reporter was made possible through the sponsorship of the United Performing Arts Fund (UPAF). Learn more: https://upaf.org/