INSIGHT NEWS IS AUDITED BY THE ALLIANCE FOR AUDITED MEDIA TO PROVIDE OUR ADVER TISER PAR TNERS WITH THE HIGHES T LEVEL OF MEDIA ASSURANCE.
Insight News
February 6, 2023 - February 12, 2023
Vol. 50 No. 6• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
ORDWAY PRESENTS
A SOLDIER’S PLAY Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play at Fitzgerald Theater A Soldier’s Play comes to The Ordway Feb 8-12. The 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning thriller by Charles Fuller, has rocketed back into the spotlight, thanks to the 2020 Tony Award to Roundabout Theatre Company, winning in the Best Revival category. Venue: The Fitzgerald Theater - Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 10 East Exchange Street, in Downtown Saint Paul. For ticket information: 651-224-4222 Broadway’s Norm Lewis leads a powerhouse cast in the North American tour of A Soldier’s Play, a show The Chicago Tribune calls “a highly entertaining, strikingly taut drama that you don’t want to end.” Directed by Tonywinner Kenny Leon, A Soldier’s Play “deserves to be staged regularly all over America— though it’s hard to imagine that it will ever be done better than this. It keeps you guessing all the way to the final curtain,” The Wall Street Journal said in praise of the show. In 1944, on a Louisiana Army base, two shots ring out. A Black sergeant is murdered. The series of interrogations that follows triggers a gripping barrage of questions about sacrifice, service, and identity in America. The horrific beating
death last month in Memphis, Tennessee, of Tyre Nichols, at the hands of five Black police officers screams the pain of generational urgency and specific enduring timeliness of themes examined by this play. What happens when Black men, driven by internalized racism, turn on each other? For Robin Hickman Winfield, CEO and Executive Producer at SoulTouch Productions here in Twin Cities, A Soldier’s Play compels us to cast an alternative vision. What happens when Black men turn to each other, rather than turn on each other? In partnership with The Ordway and Minnesota Humanities Center, HickmanWinfield is convening a Vision Trust of Black Men, creating sharing sessions inspired by A Soldier’s Play, where Black veterans of military service and, Black veterans of street service engage each other and their families and community to elevate work for justice and the dismantling of negative narratives about the value of Black life. A Thursday night talk-back session will follow the performance, encouraging veterans to share their lived experiences in the military and in the community. A Soldier’s Play had its debut in November, 1981, by Negro Ensemble Company, at Theatre Four in New York
City. The production emerged as the most successful play of the barrier-breaking work of the Ensemble. The popularity of the production ensured the Negro Ensemble Company’s financial well-being for the next 10 years. Back Story In 1966, Douglas Turner Ward, Robert Hooks, and Gerald Krone began to work on their vision for a groundbreaking, inclusive space in the theatre: a permanent home where Black theatre artists could have agency over projects made for them, by them, and about them. With Ward writing, Hooks raising money, and Krone managing, the trio produced two new plays (Happy Ending and Day of Absence) off-Broadway at the St. Marks Playhouse in Greenwich Village—to fantastic critical success. Running for 504 performances and winning Ward an Obie Award® for acting and a Drama Desk Award for writing, the plays also drew the attention of The New York Times, who invited Ward to write on American theatre’s exclusivity problem and the future of Black theatre artists in the industry. Ward took the opportunity to publish a manifesto arguing for the establishment of a resident Black theatre company, and with a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation, The Negro Ensemble Company was born. The company—which
celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017—has since been a powerhouse in training and presenting outstanding Black artists. “There is no way we could survive except by being excellent,” Ward says, and the Negro Ensemble Company’s list of alumni provides ample evidence: Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, S. Epatha Merkerson, Adolph Caesar, LaTanya Richardson-Jackson, Garrett Morris, Ruben SantiagoHudson, Billy Dee Williams, and Lou Gossett Jr., to name just a few. Overall, the Negro Ensemble Company has been home to more than 4,000 artists from every theatre practice and background, producing over 200 new plays and creating an extensive theatrical training program to solidify its commitment to inclusive arts education. Segregation in the military Jim Crow was in full force during the early 20th century and even extended to segregation within the military. During World War II, Black soldiers were not accepted into the Marines and the Army Air Corps (the precursor to the Air Force) at the beginning of the war, and in the Navy and Army, they were only allowed to take on non-combat jobs. In addition to the injustices that
these separate but inherently unequal policies reproduced, the military had its own hierarchies, structures, and laws that created a pressure cooker for the Black soldiers living under its rule. Inequitable systems such as Jim Crow breed conflict and competition among those they subjugate as a way of dividing the population and thereby decentralizing their power. There is a long history among Black Americans of intraracial prejudice enforced through respectability politics. There was a belief that if Black people behaved more “respectably,” then they would not be subject to criticism and therefore would not be victims of racism. Many prominent Black social critics and journalists write about this phenomenon even today. In his article, “Blackon-Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias,” professor, writer, and retired U.S. Navy commander Theodore R. Johnson writes, “Too often, racism is seen as a social phenomenon that happens to Black people. But it happens through Black people as well. That is, the negative associations thrust upon Black people and Black culture can color how we Black people view each other.” It’s easy to see, in the aforementioned pressure
mmaa
Robin Hickman-Winfield CEO and Executive Producer of SoulTouch Productions cooker of the Armed Forces in the 1940s, how Black soldiers might internalize this racism. Jim Crow laws put a ceiling on the potential success of Black individuals, and some fell prey to the false narrative that by breaking through that ceiling they could rise above the limits of systemic racism— when in reality, this was just another “coping mechanism,” in Johnson’s words, that put the onus back on Black Americans rather than on the system that oppressed them in the first place.
Photos courtesy of broadwayworld