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A companion guide to Story by Kenneth Jones directed by Lisa Mallette

Jan. 18-Feb. 18, 2018 Synopsis

It’s 1959 and the Civil Rights movement is starting to grip America. In Montgomery, Alabama, a fight over a controversial children’s book—one in which a black rabbit marries a white rabbit—pits one courageous woman against a segregationist state senator. Meanwhile, childhood friends reunite, only to be caught up in the political and racial tensions of the time. Inspired by true events, this drama explores tests of character and emotion that reshaped our nation.

Characters

Emily Wheelock Reed (Karen DeHart): A white librarian, the State Librarian of Alabama, born in North Carolina and raised in Indiana. A defender of curiosity and ideas.

E.W. Higgins (Erik Gandolfi): A white Alabama State Senator. A defender of his long-held values.

Lily Whitfield (Maria Marquis): A white woman of privilege, from small-town Alabama.

Joshua Moore (Bezachin Jifar): An upwardly mobile, middle-class African-American man who left Alabama more than a decade ago. Above: Joshua Moore (Bezachin Jifar) is certain he knows Lily Whitfield (Maria Marquis). All show photos by Taylor Sanders. Garth Williams (Steve Lambert): A white writer and illustrator from the East Coast, who also Cover page: A controversy pits State Librarian Emily Wheelock Reed (Karen DeHart) against assumes other roles in the play, including aged Senator E.W. Higgins (Erik Gandolfi). Photo taken outside the historic Corinthian Grand Ballroom in downtown San Jose. State Rep. Bobby Crone and Montgomery newspaper reporter Herschel Webb.

Thomas Franklin (Jeremy Ryan): A white reference librarian and Emily’s assistant, with a love of research and history.

Emily: My instinct is, if it is good enough for the American Library Association, it is good enough for me. And for the Alabama Public Library Service. Alabama is in America, is it not?

Thomas: Some say.

-from Kenneth Jones’ Alabama Story The real Emily Reed and E.W. Higgins

When the real Emily Wheelock Reed passed away in 2000, she made headlines coast to coast, with lengthy obituaries appearing in both the New York and Los Angeles Times. Alabama State Senator E.W. Higgins, whose real name was E.O. Eddins, doesn’t pop up so readily today in an online search. But he was a larger-than-life foe.

“Librarian Resisted Racists,” the L.A. Times wrote on June 5, 2000, describing Reed’s public struggle to defend the The Rabbits’ Wedding from a ban. It was a fight during a highly tumultuous time: 1959 in the American South.

“Blacks’ struggle for equality stirred ferocious resistance from whites,” the Times wrote. “Blacks were fighting for equal access to many areas of public life, including schools and libraries.” When The Rabbits’ Wedding came out, Senator Eddins and the White Citizens Council led the charge against the storybook and Reed herself, saying “the tale about two fuzzy rabbits was propaganda for integration and intermarriage.”

We won’t say here how the controversy was resolved (no spoilers for theatergoers), but we will quote a nice remark from Reed made at the time: “We have had difficulty with the book…but we have not lost our integrity.”

One of the problems that Eddins and his allies had with Reed was that she was no native daughter of Alabama. True, she was born in the South (North Carolina), but educated up North: she was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Indiana University. Reed then worked for libraries as far afield as Detroit and Hawaii before becoming Alabama’s state librarian in 1957. She had also taught library science at the University of Florida, but apparently that credential was not sufficiently Southern for some.

Edward Oswell Eddins, who was born in 1904 and hailed from the city of Demopolis, Alabama, supported a measure that would have put more “Alabama” in the state library. Had this law passed the state legislature, it would have required the state librarian to be a native of the state, as well as a graduate of the University of Alabama or Auburn University.

The “Rabbits’ Wedding” controversy made headlines around the country in 1959. Information about Eddins is difficult to find today, but he is a fully fleshed-out character in Alabama Story, where playwright Kenneth Jones gives him some emotional depth and even a passion for books. Certain books.

After the Rabbits’ Wedding controversy, Emily Reed came under fire again in Alabama for defending Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book Stride Toward Freedom. According to the Freedom to Read Foundation, she kept the book in the Alabama State Library’s collection and “would not apologize for disseminating an American Library Association ‘notable books’ list on which this book appeared.”

Later in her career, Reed worked in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore until her retirement in 1977. In 2000 she was honored by both the Freedom to Read Foundation and the American Library Association. The foundation praised her for “embodying our commitment to the freedom to read.”

Notes from the playwright

Alabama Story playwright Kenneth Jones shares what attracted him to the real-life story behind his Southern-set historical drama, and what emerged in the writing process.

I draw on many sources to get ideas for the plays and musicals that I write. Alabama Story is the result of my passion for reading newspapers. I grew up reading papers, began my writing career in journalism and can't imagine a world without the daily routine of digesting headlines.

In May 2000, while reading , I came across the story of Emily Wheelock Reed, the former State Librarian of Alabama who had been challenged by a segregationist state senator in 1959. Senator E.O. Eddins demanded that a children’s picture book — Garth Williams’ “The Rabbits’ Wedding,” about a black rabbit marrying a white rabbit — be purged from the shelves of Alabama libraries on the grounds that it promoted race-mixing. Their conflict was reported worldwide. Before I finished reading the article, I knew this was an idea for a play.

Strong characters and richly contrasting conflicts rarely just fall into my lap, but that’s exactly what happened here. Vivid opposites — male and female, black and white, insider and outsider, Southern and Northern, private and public, child and parent, purity and ugliness — were immediately evident in this forgotten slice of American history. Knowing that Montgomery, Alabama, is so highly charged, historically, as both the Cradle of the Confederacy and the Cradle of Civil Rights helped my imagination to blossom further.

The elements from real life were so bold that they seemed to jump out like the cut-outs in a pop-up children’s book. I followed their lead and I gave them a wrangler in Garth Williams himself, who speaks directly to the audience and assumes multiple roles in this land that I call The Deep South of the Imagination. (Williams’ indelible illustrations were likely part of your childhood — he created the art for “Little House on the Prairie,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “” and more.) I never approached my play as a dry docudrama; the goal was to make it “pop up” in a way that can only happen in the theatre.

Emily Reed’s story was widely documented in newspapers and magazines at the time, so a lot of source material existed, allowing me to steal and expand upon the actual language and public personalities of the participants. In fact, some of the most outrageous and theatrical language in the play, from the saber-rattling senator, is not made up. You know how playwrights sometimes explain their process as “the play wrote itself”? Well, in many ways Senator Higgins (as I renamed him) wrote himself.

The process of creating Alabama Story included research visits to Montgomery, Selma and the senator’s hometown of Demopolis, Alabama. I toured the State Capitol, walked the halls of Emily’s library office in the State Archive Building, wandered antebellum homes and graveyards and city parks and museums. I interviewed local historians and librarians and residents. I touched copies of the very newspapers that first reported this unique tale of Civil Rights through the lens of censorship.

The trip to Demopolis was particularly inspiring. It’s not only Senator Higgins’ stomping ground, but what I imagined as the childhood home of two characters who appear in the play’s reflective story. Lily and Joshua, a black man and a white woman who were once childhood friends in that small town, reunite in Montgomery the same year that the library battle is being waged. They are meant to suggest the private heart of the public controversy. Like the others in the play, they have a deep connection to books and reading, Lyon Hall, a Greek Revival mansion built in the 1850s, is one of the many 19th-century houses in Demopolis, Alabama. Built by attorney George Lyon, it is now on the National and the quality of their character will be Register of Historic Places. challenged in their exchanges.

I view Alabama Story as a mash-up of some of my favorite kinds of plays — courtroom thriller, memory play, romance, historical drama — but underneath all of that is a script about how character is tested in a time of great social change. How will you behave toward others when your world is turned upside down?

I hope that Alabama Story sparks a memory of a beloved book, the person who gave it to you and the day that you realized that a “turning of the page” could be both terrifying and wonderful. Maybe it will also be a reminder that no matter what our differences, on some level, we all share the same story.

—Kenneth Jones, November 2017

Kenneth Jones is a playwright, lyricist and librettist who writes about his own work and advocates for other theatre makers at ByKennethJones.com.

Senator Higgins: The world of the South is a line of dominoes falling one by one, and here's another one. Before this, the Montgomery bus boycott. Before that, Brown and the Board of Education. Before that — a thousand others. This one falls, and the rest will follow right on into integration and ruination, and goodbye to glory.”

-from Kenneth Jones’ Alabama Story Where’s Waldo? Not in some libraries

Harry Potter. The Wizard of Oz. Where’s Waldo? All of these books, for one reason or another, have been banned. Banned from a school. Banned from a library. Banned from the mind of a curious reader.

The history of banned books is not typically taught in schools. Only the truest of trivia masters know its mark on American culture today. So why does it matter? Who cares if one library doesn’t approve of one book? Because silence, and specifically silencing others, is the beginning of the end.

For a book to be banned, it first must be challenged. Anybody can challenge any book in a library or school. Over 1,000 different books have gone through this process since 1985. Many books continue to be tested each year.

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the most frequently challenged books in this country. It has been petitioned to be banned so consistently because it contains strong language, discussion of sexuality and rape, and the n-word. Most recently, it was banned in 2017 from a seventh- grade curriculum in Mississippi because the book just “makes people uncomfortable.”

Then comes the book ban, for many reasons and in many areas. Many young adults today who grew up in the Bible Belt weren’t allowed to read the Harry Potter series because of its normalcy of the use of magic and characterization of ghosts—and it's just too scary. The irony: the biggest Harry Potter fans today, more often than not, were those kids.

Harriet the Spy was, and is, a popular children’s book that was published in 1964. The ‘60s were a time of peace and love and counter- cultural movements; however, the older generation was often resistant to this newfound change. Harriet the Spy was banned for setting a bad example to kids. Critics said it teaches them how to lie, how to curse, and worst of all, talk back to adults.

Adding onto that, the book broke gender norms of the times. Although Charles Robinson’s 1906 illustration of the Mad Tea sexuality is never explicitly stated in the book, many lesbians identified Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis with Harriet’s feelings of an outsider and Carroll. wanting to wear boys’ clothes and high- top sneakers. One of the characters in the book is referred to as simply “Boy with the Purple Socks,” and especially during the time, purple was a color associated with being gay. These things, while seemingly small details in children’s books, caused uproar in libraries in the ’60s.

Some books are banned for their mention of drugs (Alice in Wonderland and James and the Giant Peach); others are banned simply because they had a strong female heroine (The Wizard of Oz).

And some books are banned for very, very small reasons. If you use a magnifying glass and look carefully while searching for Waldo in a Where’s Waldo? book, you’ll see a topless woman at the beach.

Besides The Rabbits’ Wedding, there were other children’s books in the ‘50s that also created debate amongst people. The First Book of Fishing by Steven Schneider was published in 1959 and is a young person’s guide to how to fish. The head librarian at a library in Louisiana ordered the book out of circulation because it contained illustrations of white and black children “fishing, picnicking, and playing together.” A first edition of Charlotte’s Web, courtesy of the . Swimming Hole by Jerrold Beim came out in 1950, and in the book, a young boy learns that “it doesn’t matter what color people are.” A former South Carolina state senator said the book was "a monstrosity and an affront and a disgrace," the Associated Press reported in 1956.

The Rabbits’ Wedding author and illustrator Garth Williams also illustrated Charlotte’s Web, which is yet another book that was challenged in the ‘50s. Charlotte’s Web is a sweet tale about farm animals and a spider who bond together, and a farm girl who loves them all. It seems innocent enough, but the theme of talking animals was too much. The argument behind banning this book was that it was anti-God; in God’s eyes, animals are below humans, and giving them the ability to talk goes directly against what He intended for the world. One concerned parent, according to NPR, went as far to say that this story, when you get down to it, is simply, “inappropriate subject matter for a children’s book.”

While some of these bans became national news, none became national norms. Reading and the power of books is something that often gets understated. Books can teach anybody, especially children, so much about the world. Completely forbidding certain stories is the opposite of what a curious reader would want.

Meet Bezachin Jifar, our Joshua

For Bezachin Jifar, who plays Joshua in Alabama Story, this play started with a struggle. And that’s been part of the reward.

Initially, Bezachin thought this would be the kind of civil-rights story he was used to. A native of Ethiopia, he has done a lot of reading about the African-American experience and is a particular fan of August Wilson. One play that has made a major impression on him is Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. “That does not give you a second to breathe,” he said. “It looks you dead in the eyes.”

Alabama Story is a very different kind of story. It spends more time on the Caucasian perspective of the civil-rights movement, and it is much less intense than Bezachin expected. At first he was disoriented. Then the script began to charm him.

“This play is very digestible. Easy to listen to, easy to be suckered into the Southern heat, the Southern lifestyle that’s slow and comfortable, just like the food,” he said. Then the reality of the Jim Crow South sinks in: in smaller and sometimes subtle ways, but as inescapable as a “Whites Only” sign in a public park.

Today Bezachin is excited about the script, saying, “I’m finding kinship with Joshua and the story.” That initial struggle, he adds, has been “part of the joy. It’s why I’m addicted to theater.”

As the kinship between actor and role has developed, Bezachin has gotten to know Joshua well. “He’s a kind man and a very disciplined man, a discipline borne out of denying God,” he says, mentioning some of the tribulations that led to Joshua’s distance from God, including the loss of his mother. “He’s keeping his mother alive by going to Bezachin Jifar, photographed in Alabama and volunteering and helping in the best way that he can. That’s his outlet, character as Joshua by Taylor Sanders. supporting the civil-rights movement.”

Though Joshua is fictional, Bezachin is continuing his research to deepen his understanding of the context. Right now he’s reading Black Detroit by Herb Boyd, learning more about the African-American neighborhoods and the ups and downs of the economy in Detroit, the city where the character has moved.

Bezachin brings a fascinating background to City Lights for his first show here, not least of all linguistic (he speaks both Amharic and English, with quite a bit of French). He moved to the United States from Ethiopia in 2005 and earned a bachelor’s in theater from Santa Clara University. Then he headed to New York, where he got an MFA in playwriting and screenwriting from the Actors Studio of Drama School at Pace University. His thesis-project play, Less Than The Number Three, about a couple trying to break up, was well received, and he’s just filmed it with two actors in Portland. This effort brings with it another educational challenge: how do you approach the business of your art, so that you can turn it into a living? It’s a journey many artists are familiar with.

In the meantime, Bezachin is delighted to have found City Lights, where he will next appear as the Prince of Morocco and Tubal in The Merchant of Venice in March and April. He sees the theater as a great place for artistic growth, and an encouraging one, with its culture of care.

“‘Care’ is the first word that came out of Lisa’s mouth,” he says of City Lights artistic director Lisa Mallette, who is directing the show. “We give care, we receive care, and from my personal life I’ve found that to be very key in life.”

What’s in a Lane Cake?

In the play, Joshua and Lily speak affectionately about a favorite childhood treat: a Lane Cake. There’s no fiction about this confection: it’s a Southern specialty that has also made appearances in To Kill a Mockingbird, TV’s “Martha Bakes,” and Jimmy Carter’s memoirs.

The cake takes its moniker from creator Emma Rylander Lane. Legend has it that she won first prize with it at a county fair, and she then published the recipe in her book A Few Good Things to Eat in 1898. A white cake, this dessert comes in different variations but always has plenty of booze (usually bourbon) baked in. Other ingredients can include pecans, raisins, coconut and candied fruit.

Martha Stewart swears that you can make Lane Cake up to three weeks in advance, because the flavor gets even tastier over time. For her part, the character of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird recalls sampling “a Lane Cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight.”

Learn more about the Mockingbird connection and get a recipe, courtesy of PBS, at bit.ly/lanecake.

An 1897 lithograph by Allied Printing - F.W. Brenckle & Co, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Alabama Story by Kenneth Jones

City Lights Theater Company presents Alabama Story from Jan. 18-Feb. 18, 2018. Shows are Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. (no show Jan. 21). The theater is at 529 S. Second St. in San Jose. Details: cltc.org, 408-295-4200.

Director: Lisa Mallette

Scenic Design: Ron Gasparinetti Production Manager/Technical Director: Joseph Hidde Lighting Design: Mia Kumamoto Costume Design: Anna Chase Sound Design: George Psarras Properties Designer: Miranda Whipple Stage Manager: Michelle Marko Assistant Stage Manager: Chiarra Sorci Master Electrician: Aya Matsutomo Video operator: Tyler Morales Carpenters: Devin Davis, Alex Yasuda, Tressa Stearns, Keenan Flagg, Kit Wilder

Featuring: Karen DeHart, Erik Gandolfi, Bezachin Jifar, Steve Lambert, Maria Marquis and Jeremy Ryan

Highlights is researched and written by City Lights dramaturg Rebecca Wallace, with the “Where’s Waldo?” section by marketing intern Carol Alban. Read past issues, and a digital version of this issue, at cltc.org/highlights.