Digging up the Buried Past

By Tom Conklin
tom@suburbanstories.net

My hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey is an affluent, somewhat smug bedroom community that prides itself in being a model of enlightened integration. It’s also home to many talented artists and actors who, for one reason or other, have decided to leave the city for white picket fences and better schools.

A few years ago, I was having a late-night conversation with a group of friends, actors mostly, and we got around to how progressive our town was. We began to argue over how integrated, demographics aside, our town truly is. Wouldn’t it be interesting, we agreed, to do an in-depth, Studs Terkel-type play about race in the town. Interview EVERYBODY to learn their attitudes toward race, encourage them to let it all hang out, and put it on stage.

Working with my friend Bev Sheehan, artistic director of the What Exit Theatre Co., I went to the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition, a local non-profit corporation promoting integration, to see if they’d be interested in sponsoring the project. They were. With a small grant in hand, I collaborated with Sibylla Nash, another local writer, and began conducting interviews.

We cast our net wide, interviewing former mayors and blue collar workers; high school students and the police sergeant assigned to patrol their school’s hallways; Wall Street executives who had recently moved to town and young shop clerks who have spent their whole lives here. We consciously picked as diverse a group as we could. Our method for interviewing was to simply turn on a recorder, tell our subjects that the interview was going to cover their views on race relations, and to let our subjects talk, allowing them to lead the interview wherever they wanted.

Nothing prepared me for what we found. I had expected to discover anger and hidden prejudice -- what I heard were explosive stories of violence and murder, deceit and self-delusion. Under the placid, well-groomed surface of the town lie personal histories as violent and cruel and, yes, hopeful as the history of America over the past 60 years.

As I began shaping the interviews into a play, our sponsors at the Coalition were something less than thrilled. They had hoped that our play would be a testament to our incredible town -- a shining example of one place where integration works. I tried explaining that the fact that people with such appalling experiences in their backgrounds are able to live side-by-side in an idyllic suburb is the best possible testament to the town as a place where integration works.

Still, our sponsors knew what they wanted. So to fulfill their needs, I crafted a evening of oral history focusing on the successful race relations in the town. The Coalition used it for a fund-raiser, and the interviews and all underlying rights reverted back to me and Sibylla. Since then, Sibylla has moved to Los Angeles, giving me permission to do with the interviews what I will.

I became obsessed with the material. I culled through the hours of interviews and found what I thought to be the six most interesting and representative characters -- representative not of the town, but of the variety of race experiences common across America: segregation, forced integration, riots, white flight, racist violence, black separatism, liberal guilt, racial identity confusion, and the ultimate reconciliation of individuals willing to overcome the sins of our past.

I’ve edited their stories into a piece of documentary theater, cutting back and forth between them as they relate their life stories, till they each climax with stories that reveal their deepest buried emotions -- and subvert the audience’s prejudiced views of them as people.

Every word of the play is taken directly from the interviews. Not one incident has been invented by the playwright. It is all presented strictly as the subjects told it to us.

The result is, in my opinion, an important and dramatic snapshot of America in 2006. These extraordinary stories of ordinary people are powerful and important. They reveal our collective present by looking at individual pasts -- and gives us hope that where we are headed doesn’t have to be determined by the mistakes and ignorance of where we have been.

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