A More Perfect Union

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

You could hear a pin drop in the theater tonight. It’s not often you hear the word “nigger” on stage in the South. You certainly don’t expect to hear it in a family-oriented musical production—and it’s almost impossible to imagine a community rallying around such an unsettling work of art. But on this summer night in Union County, South Carolina, folks have gathered for the first time to witness—and perform—a communal theatrical creation called Turn the Washpot Down. There will never be another night like it, overflowing with the cheers and tears of people who have stuck with each other through many hard times.

The performance features a cast of about 100 black and white folks from this rural Southern community, telling the true stories of the people of Union County. These tales—many of them untold for centuries—are metaphorically hidden in an old washpot in the woods where slaves used to congregate in secret. The play is a group effort to pull Union County back from the brink of disintegration. The historic area is not only economically strapped with the collapse of the textile industry, it’s also notorious as the home of Susan Smith, who in 1994 drowned her two children by driving her car into a lake, then invented a story of a black carjacker to take the blame. Two years ago, Art Sutton, who owns local radio station WBCU, organized the citizens of Union County to consider doing something about its plight. Unlikely as it sounds, they turned to a cultural solution. They hired Community Performance Inc. (CPI) to come to Union and help them develop a play.

CPI is a unique Chicago-based theater team that collaborates with communities on original plays to reenergize town pride, discover or remodel their communal identity, heal the wounds of a crisis or a rift, or examine some burning social issue like homelessness or health care. Richard Owen Geer, CPI writer and director of Turn the Washpot Down, calls these projects “of, by, and for” the people.

CPI has been hired by groups in places ranging from Virginia to Florida to Colorado, from a close community of Mennonites in Newport News, Virginia, to a wildly diverse inner-city gang of neighbors in Chicago. Each project is completely unique to its setting.

Union County’s hopes were based on the dazzling success of Swamp Gravy, a CPI-facilitated community play that turned the economy around in troubled Miller County, Georgia. Using CPI writer Jo Carson’s method of gathering local stories from every level of local society and crafting them into a script, then adding Geer’s creative direction with music and movement, Miller County inaugurated Swamp Gravy in an old cotton warehouse in Colquitt, Georgia, in 1991. The production was so successful at bridging the gap between the races and stretching the creative capacities of its citizens that it soon became recognized as the official “folk life play of Georgia,” selling out to busloads of tourists each year. A rickety venture that started with $2,000 in seed money now has a million-dollar budget, owns its own building, and has generated more than a dozen spinoff projects in Miller County. “[Swamp Gravy] is merely the most compelling experience I have ever had in the theater,” wrote editor Ed Corson in the Macon Telegraph. “It was wonderful to see a community come together—black, white, young, old, rich, poor—and create a performance that is not only healing but also compelling, authoritative, confident theater.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print