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Alabama Story by Kenneth Jones Directed by Lisa Mallette

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Alabama Story by Kenneth Jones Directed by Lisa Mallette Next on our stage: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE THE SIEGEL IN THE HEIGHTS MARCH 22-APRIL 22 MAY 17-JUNE 17 JULY 12-AUGUST 19 HIGHLIGHTS A companion guide to Alabama 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 picture book 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 the New York Times, 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,” “Stuart Little” 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.
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