Stephanie noticed a couple of free plays, when she looked at the paper's weekend entertainment section this morning. One of them, "Crossing the Divide," was a play put on, written, and then re-worked by Louisville young people (somewhat as with Vincent's 10-minute plays), sponsored by Actor's Theater of Louisville and underwritten by corporate sponsorships. Narrowly, the play is about the city/police department's decision to essentially put the working-class/predominantly African-American Louisville West Side on a 24-hour curfew the day before and the day of the Kentucky Derby for the past two years, as a reaction to a particularly rambunctious period of Broadway "Cruising" the year before, when traffic backed up into my old neighborhood (getting closer to white areas) and there was several stabbings and shootings and women taking their clothes off, etc. Cruising (with its white counterpart on Bardstown Road) (really along with the Pegasus Parade) represent a kind of counter-Derby festival. People who go to the Derby are mainly wealthy white people (although there is also the "infield" and Bardstown Road), while Louisville working-class African Americans (and many out-of-town visitors also) do cruising. Family and neighborhood picnics went bust, West Side businesses lost money, and West Side residents had to get passes for themselves to enter their neighborhoods. But "Crossing" was also about segregation and class and racial differentiation and inequality in Louisville, as in many other cities, too.
The play very much resembled Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman play "Twilight Los Angeles " (which I've seen on video) about the L.A. riots, in which she alternatively played several dozen different roles, from Korean American shop owners to rioters to police officers.
We had trouble finding the site. And when we got there it turns out we weren't at a theater, but at a house in the West side, at 32nd and Broadway, that has been converted into a community center by/for a leftwing antiracist group who had people involved as actors in the play. There was also a free dinner (though donations were an option), and others had come in from the neighborhood. So there we were in the back yard with maybe 50-60 blacks and whites, eating fried chicken (an abysmal Weight Watchers night) and watching vignettes from the play interspersed with poetry readings, an MC, and eventually - comments from the audience about how they saw Derby/cruising. We really didn't get a chance to talk with people much - which was too bad - as we got there late and left early and on breaks we talked some with each other. It was a bit like visiting someone else's church (although I used to be in leftwing groups like this). It was somewhat impressive that white, black, and Asian American leftists had plunked down in the West Side, in a house next to an abandoned house and a few houses down from the noisy Shawnee Expressway, which cuts through the middle of the West Side (and I had taken between work and the Clinton rally the day before - there were vague disparaging remarks about Clinton and McCain - clearly, Obama country), when many white people won't even venture into the West Side. Unlike Tallahassee, there is a giant majority black area, and then majority white areas although there a few complicated neighborhoods in Louisville, like my old neighborhood (a black majority but somewhat integrated pocket of the largely white East side). Early on in Louisville I drove down all the way down Broadway (stopping finally at a Walgreen's - not a lot of businesses - and discovering that Louisville has a black-oriented weekly paper, the "Louisville Defender") to the Ohio River and Shawnee Park (around 60th street), up Shawnee Park, and back eventually down Market Street into downtown (past Portland, a formerly white working class pocket on the West Side where one of my colleagues is from). Then two years ago Stephanie and I took Vincent to a Sweet Sixteen birthday party of a (middle-class) classmate of his, in a far southwest West Side former low-income public housing project, that had been Hope VI-ed into more upscale housing. Stephanie and I also drove out to Shawnee Park to see an affordable house she'd seen advertised, and then I went to Portland in December for a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. That's not very many times in four years (three years for Stephanie and Vincent), but that's four more times than many other Louisville East Enders have been to the West side in the past four years. Stephanie also used to drive on Interstate 64 past Portland and the north tip of the West Side when she took 64 and the Sherman Minton Bridge into Indiana, when she taught at Mt. Tabor Elementary School.
We were surprised by the community picnic/leftwing gathering/just excerpts from the play with other things thrown in. But it was an interesting experience, and parts of the play seemed really good. (Unfortunately, a particularly pointed anti-racist poetry reading, early on, turned off Vincent pretty quickly. And the fact that Louisville has an African-American police chief and that the city/police department opened up Broadway again during Derby weekend - though again banning cruising - complicates the picture somewhat.) Different actors played different people in the Derby/cruising conflict, from police officers to West Side business people, to white Derby/Churchill Downs infield party animals. The white man who wrote the original script spoke first, and read to me critical prologue that had gotten excised from the final version of the play the company had performed Thursday night and was to perform again Saturday night at Actor's Theater. It was only during the epilogue, with all of the actors (including some whose individual performances were left off of this community picnic version), that the overall vision must have become clear at Actor's.
A final footnote: The community center is named for Carl Braden, half of a left-liberal white couple whose legendary support for the civil rights movement I'd read about before I moved to Louisville. In 1957 they bought a house in Shively (the then all-white southwest suburb where I saw President Clinton yesterday) and sold it to an African-American couple. The house got firebombed and Kentucky convicted them of sedition. To my discredit, when Carl Braden's widow, Anne, died a couple of years ago in Louisville (preceding in death another white left-liberal/early civil rights supporter: zoo keeper Henry Wallace), I did not go to her memorial service, which probably would have been both educational and meaningful.
The play very much resembled Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman play "Twilight Los Angeles " (which I've seen on video) about the L.A. riots, in which she alternatively played several dozen different roles, from Korean American shop owners to rioters to police officers.
We had trouble finding the site. And when we got there it turns out we weren't at a theater, but at a house in the West side, at 32nd and Broadway, that has been converted into a community center by/for a leftwing antiracist group who had people involved as actors in the play. There was also a free dinner (though donations were an option), and others had come in from the neighborhood. So there we were in the back yard with maybe 50-60 blacks and whites, eating fried chicken (an abysmal Weight Watchers night) and watching vignettes from the play interspersed with poetry readings, an MC, and eventually - comments from the audience about how they saw Derby/cruising. We really didn't get a chance to talk with people much - which was too bad - as we got there late and left early and on breaks we talked some with each other. It was a bit like visiting someone else's church (although I used to be in leftwing groups like this). It was somewhat impressive that white, black, and Asian American leftists had plunked down in the West Side, in a house next to an abandoned house and a few houses down from the noisy Shawnee Expressway, which cuts through the middle of the West Side (and I had taken between work and the Clinton rally the day before - there were vague disparaging remarks about Clinton and McCain - clearly, Obama country), when many white people won't even venture into the West Side. Unlike Tallahassee, there is a giant majority black area, and then majority white areas although there a few complicated neighborhoods in Louisville, like my old neighborhood (a black majority but somewhat integrated pocket of the largely white East side). Early on in Louisville I drove down all the way down Broadway (stopping finally at a Walgreen's - not a lot of businesses - and discovering that Louisville has a black-oriented weekly paper, the "Louisville Defender") to the Ohio River and Shawnee Park (around 60th street), up Shawnee Park, and back eventually down Market Street into downtown (past Portland, a formerly white working class pocket on the West Side where one of my colleagues is from). Then two years ago Stephanie and I took Vincent to a Sweet Sixteen birthday party of a (middle-class) classmate of his, in a far southwest West Side former low-income public housing project, that had been Hope VI-ed into more upscale housing. Stephanie and I also drove out to Shawnee Park to see an affordable house she'd seen advertised, and then I went to Portland in December for a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program. That's not very many times in four years (three years for Stephanie and Vincent), but that's four more times than many other Louisville East Enders have been to the West side in the past four years. Stephanie also used to drive on Interstate 64 past Portland and the north tip of the West Side when she took 64 and the Sherman Minton Bridge into Indiana, when she taught at Mt. Tabor Elementary School.
We were surprised by the community picnic/leftwing gathering/just excerpts from the play with other things thrown in. But it was an interesting experience, and parts of the play seemed really good. (Unfortunately, a particularly pointed anti-racist poetry reading, early on, turned off Vincent pretty quickly. And the fact that Louisville has an African-American police chief and that the city/police department opened up Broadway again during Derby weekend - though again banning cruising - complicates the picture somewhat.) Different actors played different people in the Derby/cruising conflict, from police officers to West Side business people, to white Derby/Churchill Downs infield party animals. The white man who wrote the original script spoke first, and read to me critical prologue that had gotten excised from the final version of the play the company had performed Thursday night and was to perform again Saturday night at Actor's Theater. It was only during the epilogue, with all of the actors (including some whose individual performances were left off of this community picnic version), that the overall vision must have become clear at Actor's.
A final footnote: The community center is named for Carl Braden, half of a left-liberal white couple whose legendary support for the civil rights movement I'd read about before I moved to Louisville. In 1957 they bought a house in Shively (the then all-white southwest suburb where I saw President Clinton yesterday) and sold it to an African-American couple. The house got firebombed and Kentucky convicted them of sedition. To my discredit, when Carl Braden's widow, Anne, died a couple of years ago in Louisville (preceding in death another white left-liberal/early civil rights supporter: zoo keeper Henry Wallace), I did not go to her memorial service, which probably would have been both educational and meaningful.
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