A New Play

a story evolves

Despite getting a late start and having to visit the doctor (where they did unspeakable things to what is left of my body), I had a really productive day.

Despite being difficult and painful to write, I was pleased with today’s story once I got it out of me. Make whatever metaphor you want out of that. Reading the story on my cellphone, while watching nursing students throw each other in the pool and sipping half a finger of whiskey (all I’m allowed), I realized this is obviously a play.

If I’m ever to be taken seriously as a writer, I have to stop writing just stories and finish something long. This isn’t a play that I’m hoping to be a movie. It’s very specifically theatrical. There are a lot of plays and movies and novels about Mississippi in the sixties; they’re often about freedom fighters, lawyers, revolutionaries, and a feisty young journalist writing about her momma’s maid; there aren’t very many stories about the sixties in Mississippi when you’re a little boy.

The play starts in 1963 in Jackson Mississippi. What happened in Jackson in 1963 that’s so special? How about?

• Born of Conviction statement published in Mississippi Methodist Advocate

• Boyd Campbell (sr) Dies

• Mayor Thompson closes Jackson Pools rather than integrate them.

• 600 African citizens of Jackson attempt to meet with Mayor Thompson

• In an effort to enact the ruling in Brown, the Justice Dept made a plan to end school segregation “with all deliberate speed” The decision means no more delays in school desegregation

• Woolworth Sit-In

• Mississippi Methodist Conference severs any connection to Reverend Ed King

• Galloway United Methodist Church turns away 5 Tougaloo students trying to enter.

• Medgar Evers was Murdered

• Ed King was nearly killed by men trying to "frighten" him

• Dr. W. F. Selah resigns from Galloway

• James Meridith graduates from Ole Miss

• Martin Luther King "I Have a Dream" march on Washington

• Methodist Conference assigns WJ Cunningham to Galloway

• 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham

• Tougaloo Students arrested trying to integrate Galloway

I was born on the sixteenth day of the sixth month in 1963. I was baptized on the very last day of 1963 by a man who was not my pastor the day I was born.

Four characters in the play aren’t double-cast. There is the Narrator, who goes from zero to sixty years old in the play. Farmer Jim Neal chronicles the events of the world. Feist Dog-Male and Feist Dog-Female play the subconscious mind of the Narrator.

All the rest of the characters are cross-cast. Changing a hat and changing a shirt makes the same actor an entirely new person. Race is an element of the play. Use race in your casting to make the point the director is trying to pull out of the script.

Secondary Characters include:

• Father

• Mother

• Brother 1 (Brother 1 is mute for reasons I’ll explain in the play)

• Brother 2 (Brother 2 is always on stage with Brother 1)

• Sister

• Martha Hammond

• First Grade Teacher

• Second Grade Teacher

• Third Grade Teacher

• Girl 1

• Girl 2

• Allen C Thompson

• Ross Barnett

• William Winter

• Forrest J Ackerman

• Rev. Ed King

• Hattie Mae Grant

• James Meridith

• Fannie Lou Hammer

I’m trying to think of more black characters, but to be honest, most of the most important characters in 1963 are martyred. I think it’ll be interesting to have Hattie, a servant, play off Fannie Lou Hammer, a revolutionary. Two women, about the same age, both born as sharecroppers, but with remarkably different approaches to life.

The play isn’t about race; it’s about being born into that struggle and about how much change can happen in one lifetime. There will probably be other characters.