Still Sundays

What skin color is art?  1925. Inhaling the energy of Theodore Dreiser, Wharton Esherick, and Jasper Deeter. Guardians of the Flame.

October 10th.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.


The neighborhood of Mount Airy in Philadelphia boasts a variety of architecture but the grand Victorians dominate. The beautiful houses seem as old as the glorious trees and forest canopy; the varied flower gardens are crafted within breathtaking stone landscaping. This makes every turn around the corner ready for the perfect photograph or painting. The historic homes are as unique as the people inside: playwrights, doctors, lawyers, professors, etc.

Stillness pours seamlessly when surrounded by an abundance of nature.

One of my closest friends—we have been friends for almost twenty years—lives in Philly. This is not my first time visiting so I am quite familiar with different neighborhoods and suburbs. I will not elaborate on stillness here given there exists a previous Still Sunday from a different area of Philadelphia.

This weekend’s visit was unique because my friend was a lead in a historic play located in a legendary location.

And she is an African-American.

The character she played amongst an all white cast was that of a white female who gets murdered.



In July of 1906 a man named Chester Gillette murdered Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the beautiful Adirondacks.


In 1925 the American novelist Theodore Dreiser based his realistic and vivid novel An American Tragedy on the events surrounding the aforementioned murder. Dreiser is known as one of the principal exponents of American Naturalism. Although its origins were European, naturalism was an important movement in American literature from the 1890s until the 1920s. Naturalism is more than a literary technique: it emphasizes the limited ability of humans to impose will upon their destiny. Dreiser in An American Tragedy indicts America’s industrial society for dazzling persons like the protagonist with the dream of an unattainable and meretricious luxury that pushes him to cruelly murder a woman he loved.


In 1923, actor/director Jasper Deeter and other theater artists established America’s first resident repertory theater, Hedgerow, in the arts and crafts community of Rose Valley, Pennsylvania and spearheaded the national theater movement.  Let me restate: Hedgerow was the first resident repertory theater in United States.

Deeter fell in love with the intimacy of the grist mill-turned borough hall, the aesthetic appreciation of the community, and the opportunity to create a theater with an artistic rather than a commercial center. Hedgerow quickly gained a national and international reputation as a proving ground for such artists as Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, and Wharton Esherick.


Wharton Esherick, an architect and pioneer of studio furniture, helped with stage designs and general carpentry and is also known for his sculptures. Even to this date, one can feel his vision of bringing the natural inside the architecture inside.


The trajectories of the three men, Dreiser (the novelist), Deeter (actor, director), and Esherick (architect) came together in 1935 for the world premiere of an adaption of Dreiser’s novel from a German stage adaptation of the play into English.

Deeter’s masterful production attracted world-wide attention as it merged thematic and theatrical elements to tell the story of a man’s struggle with himself and the world around him. This production became a hallmark of epic theater in America and Hedgerow Theater became a primary interpreter of Dreiser’s most important work.


Today Hedgerow flourishes under the passionate leadership of Penelope Reed. She turned to Louis Lippa, an award-winning director, playwright and brilliant actor to present An American Tragedy to a 2010 audience, 75 years later. Dreiser’s words would lead the way to see history with new eyes and check the pistons of status quo.

The play has received nothing but excellent reviews. Yet none have brought up the skin color of my extremely talented friend Erica Hawthorne. After seeing the first half of the play I immediately understood why: her performance is seamless. The media is not being politically correct, the production is just that well done.

In an entire white cast, with a mostly white audience, I forgot many things. I forgot this is one of my best friends; I forgot this is the same friend who in our high school in Kansas could never get a lead role in any play because of her skin color given it would be artistically inaccurate; I forgot her skin color and really saw Roberta, the main character she was playing: a helpless, white woman who is a factory worker shackled by her circumstances due to poverty.

Well, in my typical fashion, I excused myself from the group of friends with whom I attended the play, and dove in with the cloak of my sincere curiosity. I wanted to know. I was going to politely inquire, those in the audience willing to engage on this topic, what they thought about an African-American playing a role designed for a white woman. There was hardly a discussion: they found my question odd. All with whom I spoke said the same thing: they had forgotten the lead was an African-American after the first five minutes.

Was I the only one who thought this was a big deal? Should this not be a topic for the papers? Have we really transcended color lines? Can brown folks really play roles other than those that are historically accurate?

In the 1906 reality and the 1935 play, had the murdered woman been an African-American, the man (both in real life and the male protagonist of the novel) responsible for the murder, would have never gotten the death penalty.


Slavery officially ended when the 13th amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the states in 1865.  However, the South managed by various legal means to keep many African-Americans in a state that, except for the name, was slavery. The date at which slavery was finally legally abolished everywhere was July 1, 1928.

It was 1923 when a man named Jasper Deeter came together with others to establish a racially integrated company of resident, local, and visiting artists.

A woman named Penelope Reed, the current producing artistic director of Hedgerow, and Louis Lippa and others are the guardians of that Flame.

This is why screenwriters like Jeanne Bowerman can’t give up pitching the  screenplay adaptation of Slavery By Another Name, a Pulitzer Prize winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon.  


Can Othello be portrayed as a white man? If you make the rest of the cast brown, I suppose why not…after all, isn’t that what Art at its optimum supposed to do? Push you to fire yourself into the range of why not.


Our current humanity rests at the grace, vision, and perseverance of guardians of a universal Flame that will not accept slavery—including that of intellectual, spiritual, and emotional laziness—by any name.


Our blue marble is spinning spinning spinning and I am just one body barely gripping the earth with my weak fingertips, hanging onto understand the joy and responsibility of Freedom as I share the scrapings offered to me while I hang on to surface of Living.

I am indebted to nights like last night that bring me back to why I must find stillness to write.

Our salvation is creativity.

Still.


~a.q.s.

8 responses to “Still Sundays”

  1. yolanda says:

    Great post, Annie! When you wrote this the hairs on my arm stood at attention, “Our current humanity rests at the grace, vision, and perseverance of guardians of a universal Flame that will not accept slavery—including that of intellectual, spiritual, and emotional laziness—by any name.” May creativity be color blind.

  2. t2van says:

    Annie Q! Brilliant observation and post. The great magic of theatre is the suspension of disbelief. With a minimal set, great direction and acting, we are transported immediately into the world of the play and all previously existing real-world ‘boundaries’ fall away.
    Marion Bridge, the play I’m appearing in late January 2011 is about three sisters. I’m blonde haired, blue-eyed and am playing the eldest sister, the middle sister is played by an actress of Japanese parentage and the youngest is a curly, dark-haired and dark-eyed actress. Suspension of disbelief.
    If the boundaries can disappear in the theatre, why not in the ‘real world’?

  3. Very well said, Annie. How lovely that at least today’s theatre is colorblind… finally. May it continue beyond the theatrical community.

  4. LunaJune says:

    Annie..for a still sunday…such deep thoughts :~)
    I like it when directors offer us things that make us think… even more when seamlessly don’t notice.
    My nephew is a director of stage..and it was his deep love for Shakespear that had him constantly giving women men’s roles, and viceversa.
    I love having the curtains open, and being transported and watching the viel of that’s my friend, that’s my nephew slip away, and only the character remain. He also loves minimalistic sets, and at first it bothered me… “where am I to look? ” I’d say…. to which he’d respond ‘the actors will show you where’ now when seeing elaborate sets I find myself looking at the props and not the actors.

    As for the past.. we all know the answer to that question… If it had been an African-American woman….not even a jail sentance…and to that all I can say is…I am glad I was not born then.

    Thanks for the history lesson :~)

  5. You have cool friends. As such an inquisitive and thoughtful person, I imagine you have friends who are the same. Your conversations must be truly interesting!

  6. I am comparing this scenario to its opposite, where white people play roles that in their original script were non-white. Of course, because this has been so common and debated, it is tricky to look at objectively.

    So, if I question the racial dynamic when white people play non-white roles, should I be colour-blind when non-white people play white roles?

    Like you, I would probably not be able to completely ignore this novelty, howver, ultimately coming to the conclusion that art can detach itself from race, which is why we cherish it so much. Art has no skin colour.

    “Stillness pours seamlessly when surrounded by an abundance of nature.” I love this observation Annie!!

  7. *however, I meant to type!

  8. In such moments we see evidence that physical differences are simply a matter of perception, and that humankind can see beyond such artificial measures when exposed to the power of raw human spirit.

    To see Cate Blanchett play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There is a mastery of transcending genders, so much so that there didn’t seem to be a woman or man present is those scenes, but rather the personification of Dylan devoid of gender.

    Such is the power and beauty of theatre and film.