By Abigail Gampel

“TThis isn’t gonna matter,” says a tall boy with big hair, as he leads his group of high school classmates to sit, wide-legged, in the back of the cafeteria. Chairs are arranged in rows, and a big screen in front projects images of the American South in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. Water fountains labeled Colored only and Whites only; the Ku Klux Klan in robes and coned hats around a burning pyre; beautifully dressed and pressed people, black and white, protesting together; coiffed white women shouting profanities at a young black girl, faces mangled; a black man hanging from a tree, lynched; the Washington Monument.

The last image is our cue. Audrey Martells begins to walk from the back towards the stage, singing, “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain….” Soon the song would be passed to me across the room to continue.

We are at New Heights Academy, in New York City’s Harlem. The four of us, two black performers and two white, take in our audience of boys, almost men, and girls on the cusp of womanhood. Our playwright sits amidst them, running the slides and keeping track of time. One student enters late, her lips painted springtime pink, four cellophane birthday balloons tied to her wrist and floating overhead. She chooses to sit in the back row, alone.

We mingle around them as we prepare to perform our second consecutive show of “March On!” It is a staged documentary telling the story of August 28, 1963, when 250,000 people of all colors gathered together on the Mall in Washington, DC — against the seemingly impossible odds of that era, the mandate of segregation, the heat, the distances traveled, the threat of violence. Yet everyone stood peacefully, demanding Jobs! Justice! Equality! for Black people.

The documentary is told through the narratives of three real people who marched that day: two 20-somethings named Ellen Frankel and Carl Berry, and a teenager named Don Kelley. We speak their words, interwoven with stories and facts of the civil rights movement.

This theatre piece was created by Blackberry Productions to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. It has been performed at Frederick Douglas High School; from the pulpit at The First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem; on the stage at York College in Jamaica Queens; at The Marion Anderson Theatre at CUNY’s Aron Davis Hall. We have brought the piece to community organizations of the elderly, many who marched themselves; to disabled and mentally challenged men and women; to public elementary and high schools.

The goal? To begin new conversations. Where are we today, racially speaking, and from where have we come? Do we speak openly about fear and otherness? What goes into making actual change, the elusive goal for which millions have risked their lives in the past? Where are we on our racial track towards equality in America in classrooms, on trains, in police departments, in the White House, in education in the South and in the North, in the Tea Party and within liberal circles? Is there equality in this country today?

At New Heights Academy in the fluorescent light, I am very aware of being the only white woman in the room. Most of the students in this audience are either immigrants or first-generation from the Dominican Republic. I am self-conscious. I stand out, representing something to them, or maybe I represent nothing. I am clear that inside my own self there is conflict; on this day in 2015, it is not quiet inside my head.

Perhaps the boy with big hair, head looking down as he spoke to his crew, is right to say that it isn’t gonna matter. One 45-minute piece of theatre — how will it matter? It may be easier if it doesn’t.

Regardless, I ask a teacher to move them up front.

When we began rehearsals for March On!, we talked about the courage it took for each attendee of the 1963 march to get to DC. They came from the Deep South, from the West, the East, the North, from communities small and large. The one commitment that every attendee made was non-violence. They had to know that violence might happen towards them, that it probably would — but each and every person who attended simply would not fight back, no matter the rage and pain inside of them, or the hate and fear coming at them.

My fellow performers and I talked about our own courage: Would we have gone? Would we go today? Would we be so resolute in the face of all at risk? Did our belief in the need for change outweigh our fear of being hurt?

Daniel Carlton, the playwright, took on the project after his friend and Blackberry Production colleague Stephanie Berry, who conceived and directed this piece, asked him to join her. “[I was] interested in how History takes the story away from the people,” he said. “It becomes told in the perspective of the scholars and the journalists, rarely told in the perspective of the people who were there.”

So Stephanie and Daniel found a group of people who went to the march and interviewed them. The play begins in the voice of a white journalist on the job, witnessing the thousands of folks calmly taking over the DC lawns, early on the morning of August 28. Our characters’ narratives threaded between civil rights stories and the words of Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Gloria Richardson, Bull Connor. “The young girl Claudette Colvin from Birmingham, Alabama, who sat in the front of the bus a year before Rosa Parks,” said Stephanie. “I felt bad her story was never told!”

“I also wanted to acknowledge the people whose sacrifices, made for justice, inspired the civil rights movement,” she added. She related the story of the Chicago woman Mamie Till. Her 14-year-old son Emmett had gone to visit family in Money, Mississippi, and was brutally murdered for supposedly “whistling” at a white woman from whom he bought candy. Mamie Till never gave up for a second. She was determined and fought to make sure her son’s body came home. She made the long trip down South and endured being spit at, threatened. And she brought Emmett back, against impossibility. She insisted on having an open casket funeral in Chicago, so, as Stephanie said, “America could see the ugly face of racism!”

Music — in particular, freedom songs and hymns — were integral to the show. “Everyone has heard at least one of them,” said Stephanie. “They are in our bodies somewhere, bringing all kinds of music together.” Daniel talked about Matt Jones a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights activist and freedom singer, who wrote hundreds of songs every time he went to jail. He would have his fellow prisoners sing them together.

To explore Mamie Till’s life, Audrey and I sang a counterpoint. We sang “Strange Fruit” interwoven with “Oh Freedom.” Billie Holiday and Anonymous: both wrote songs that helped people survive the atrocities they faced.

Southern trees
Oh oh oh freedom
Bear a strange fruit
Oh oh freedom
Blood on the leaves
Oh oh freedom over me
Blood at the root
And before I’d be a slave
Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze,
I’ll be buried in my grave
Strange fruit hangin’
And go home, to my Lord
From the poplar trees
And be free

Audrey then becomes Mamie and shares Emmett’s story. His picture appears on the screen behind her, as he was in his open casket. The photo depicts him as his mother wanted him to be seen, nothing hidden, unidentifiable as her boy. He was swollen, misshapen, damaged, colorless from being underwater, and all cut up from barbed wire. His tongue had been cut out and pushed back in his mouth. “But he had on the ring,” Audrey said as Mamie, referring to the ring once owned by Emmett’s father, Louis Till. Mamie gave it to him the day before he left to visit his Mississippi family. It is inscribed with the initials “LT.”

This grainy photo, taken from a 1955 newspaper, is so terrible that it doesn’t look real (here is a link to the gruesome photo). But his mother’s words are so visceral that each time it comes on the screen, there are gasps from the young people in the audience.

A student from Starr Academy later wrote, “The part of the show that stood out the most to me was the Emmett Till piece. The pictures that were shown in the background sort of made everything so real.”

This was, in fact, one of Stephanie’s goals. “I don’t want them to see a production,” she said. “I want them to experience history.”

As we perform at New Heights, I watch as the five boys, now in the front row, whisper and tug at each other. They begin to get louder as Dwayne, the Black actor, performs. Dwayne begins riffing as Don, the teenage marcher whose priest is Malcolm X. He switches to play civil rights leader John Lewis, crying out for America to “Wake Up!” He sings Sam Cooke’s, “A Change is Gonna Come,” his voice soaring.

The boys fidget, making their presence known, seemingly trying to get his attention. Are they trying to put him down? I wonder. Dwayne gets taller and doesn’t give them anything of his grief. But in the corner of his eye, he subtly motions to the teacher to come and take control. I watch fascinated as he challenges these boys to be respectful, to listen, to perhaps drop their defenses.

I later asked Dwayne what he was thinking during those moments. “They think they’ve heard it all before, so it’s boring,” he replied. “They don’t need it; they got it!”

“But they really became louder when you took the stage, did you notice that?”

“[To them], what I’m doing is corny, I’m selling out,” he said. “I’m not using street language. Even as a grown man playing basketball in New York, in some parts of town- if you ‘speak well,’ you ‘talk white.’”

At our first rehearsal, Dwayne made it clear that it was deeply important for him to reach youth with these stories. He wants to speak of what mattered to him, what he learned from his family, what he wants to pass to his young children. He wants to get young people involved in their histories and in their futures.

“I was on Broadway when Sean Bell was killed” in 2006 by the NYPD, he recalled. “50 bullets. There was a protest downtown. I asked some of my African-American cast members if they wanted to come with me down to the march. They laughed and said, ‘I’d get arrested.’ I had to go. I went alone.”

At an early rehearsal, a young man — a choreographer who roomed with our producer — came in with bags from Pathmark. We were due for a big snowstorm, so we were chatting about the snacks we’d buy on our ways home to survive the impending inches. The conversation turned to his younger half-brother in Philadelphia, who needed to change high schools immediately. He was going to travel from Harlem to Philly right as the storm hit its peak, to be with his brother and help him find a new high school. He couldn’t continue where he had been.

Why? No one directly asked. It eventually emerged that his brother had, a week prior, witnessed the fatal stabbing of his cousin, right beside him, right after school, just feet outside of their school. Both were 14 years old, as was the boy who had the knife. And just like that, a boy is dead. Philly is rough, he said, very matter-of-fact. His brother was traumatized.

For me, this was the stuff of newspaper stories. For him and his brother, and others in the room with me, this was life to be moved through. His expectations to be helped by anyone were not high. He would take charge and handle this for his half-brother as best as he could, hopefully finding a way to a good education, art, mentors, a decent job, away from a life of anger due to a cycle they didn’t create.

The baseline of the conversation was a far cry from my day-to-day, from my “Upper West Side, mixed ethnicity, not rich, not poor, passing as a white person, native of New York City” reality. No matter how much I want to understand, to empathize….

OOne of my characters in “March On!” explains the Jim Crow South. “Whatever those n*gger lovers in Washington say, this is how it works here,” I say to the high school students, wondering how these hateful words sound to my young, hormone-laden audience. “No mixing in swimming pools, at water fountains, in churches, on buses, trains, on the sidewalk, in schools.”

On the other hand, I played Ellen, a white woman from a small Massachusetts town, who recalled the one black family in her town, separated from everyone else. It didn’t make sense to her, it never did; segregation angered her. She’s Jewish, so perhaps was herself aware of being the “other,” though in a subtler way. She was compelled to be at the march — her internal compass wouldn’t allow her not to be. She met her husband-to-be that day “on the rickety old school bus that left NY to DC from Sheridan Square.”

Through her, I experience being a member of this historic gathering. I stand in the shoes of so many types of people living at that time, in the heat of the cafeteria, surrounded by adolescence and living questions about being white, being Black, Dominican, being a person in America today.

In this time of iPhones and Twitter and Facebook, in a time of burying our heads in our phones and disconnecting from each other, the play provides an entirely connected experience. As Audrey passes “America the Beautiful” to me at the top of the performance, I walk from the back of the house singing, “…For purple mountains majesties, above the fruited plain.”

I watch as students turn to the sound of a voice. I see so many simultaneous reactions. It’s cool. She’s weird. Why’s the white chick singing? She’s uncomfortably close to me! Whoa, nice dress! She’s looking in my eyes!!

I too have so many reactions, looking into their faces, aware of my skin, my defenses, her pretty eyes, his smile, his looking away, wishing I was Wonder Woman, delight, hope, discomfort, awe, questioning whether we really can connect. Will this matter? Do I matter here?

“Words are the messenger of the wish,” an acting teacher of mine once said. In theatre, they never land or happen in the same way twice. It’s a living human experience of passing on stories, humanity, history, unfolding and opening questions. It’s a way to begin a conversation — in this case, a potentially charged one about race.

So, to answer the boy with the big hair and the crew: Is this gonna matter? In scientific terms, we are all matter. Everything is matter. In my own human experience, it takes courage to learn from history, to listen, to care. To be open to other people’s attempts to matter. To allow ourselves to matter.

Cast: Richard Kent Green, Audrey Martells, Dwayne Clark, Abigail Gampel
Blackberry Productions: John-Martin Green, Stephanie Berry
Playwright: Daniel Carlton
Sponsors: Healing Arts Initiative, Community Works