English faculty, students recognized for dramatic work
Interactive lobby display garners national attention
By Lauren Karch
“When you walked into the auditorium, it was 1964…all the actors were in period, approaching you and asking if you wanted to start the training and go down to Mississippi.”
—Katie Johnson
“If you can crack Mississippi, you can crack the South.” This was the belief held by the volunteers determined to work for civil rights by registering Mississippian African Americans to vote during the events that came to be known as 1964 “Freedom Summer.” Oxford served as an orientation and training site for these brave volunteers. As part of the ongoing “Finding Freedom Summer” project, Miamians came together in October to produce “Down in Mississippi,” a play about three college-aged volunteers.
“Down in Mississippi” was well-received, and, in January, its interactive lobby display received a certificate of merit at the 2010 Region 3 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF), a national program for theatre arts at the college level. English students and faculty were among those involved in making 1964 Mississippi come alive.
Associate professor of English Katie Johnson served as dramaturg for “Down in Mississippi.” She explained that an advisory committee of Miami faculty and staff and Oxford residents, spearheaded by professors Ann Elizabeth Armstrong (Theatre) and Mary Jane Berman (American and World Cultures), planned “Finding Freedom Summer” and commissioned playwright Carlyle Brown to compose the play.
As dramaturg, Johnson worked to ensure historical accuracy in the play. She also worked with students to develop the lobby display, which was designed by Audree Riddle, a senior history/Western program major.
“Instead of having a two-dimensional lobby space, I wanted it to come alive,” Johnson said. “We in essence created another play—before the official performance began—that was interactive and performative.”
“When you walked into the auditorium, it was 1964. You walked in and all the actors were in period, approaching you and asking if you wanted to start the training and go down to Mississippi.”
“Participating in the lobby performance allowed me to challenge myself to be confident in my abilities as a writer and researcher.”
—Chamere Poole
One of those performers was Chamere Poole, a graduate student in the English department. Johnson recruited her after she completed a monologue presentation for Johnson’s graduate seminar on performance theory. Poole said that “Down in Mississippi” helped her grow as a creative writer, researcher, and public speaker.
“I am a very quiet person, and I would never have imagined that I would be acting in such a big project like ‘Down in Mississippi.’ Since Dr. Johnson had thought so highly of my performance in her class to ask me to participate, I knew that I had to at least give it a try,” Poole said. “Participating in the lobby performance allowed me to challenge myself to be confident in my abilities as a writer and researcher as I edited and committed to memory the monologue that I would be performing.”
Jessica Winters, a theatre and English literature major, researched the historical or cultural context of the show alongside Johnson and created scripts and documents for the lobby. Winters said that acknowledging the many participants of the Civil Rights Movement proved challenging.
“I learned so much about the movement. It is amazing to me how much I did not know about black history and American history,” Winters said. “As I read about the individuals for the biographies, I was limited by time and space for the number of people I could choose to write about, as well as the information I could include about each person,” she said. “It was tough to make choices about what research I should share.”
Johnson said the lobby display helped convey the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement.
“The play only had four characters in it, but the movement was so complex and there were so many people involved,” she said.The lobby display offered insight into the lives of other key players in the Civil Rights Movement. In the lobby, six students performed living history, playing the roles of real civil rights advocates. Students researched, wrote, and performed monologues as representatives of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, two major groups from the Civil Rights Movement involved in Freedom Summer. The audience heard “freedom songs” from the training sessions, performed by the Miami University Gospel Choir. A student-created documentary allowed visitors to hear the voices of local Oxford residents discussing the town’s role in the Civil Rights Movement.
Documents for audience members also allowed for more interactive education about Freedom Summer. Each audience member received an identification card, similar to those given out at Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. The cards gave a small biography and picture of an influential person from the Civil Rights Movement, and visitors could follow that person’s life in the 60’s. Programs handed out to the audience were modeled after the training manuals received by Freedom Summer volunteers.
Johnson says the display drove its members to recognize the emotions and determination that drove the Freedom Summer volunteers. She pointed out that the majority of Freedom Summer volunteers were no older than the students performing in the lobby.
“We wanted to make it alive and engaging, not something were you could walk in and simply walk back out,” Johnson said.
The audience responded well.
“I felt that people seemed timid at first, unsure of the unconventional lobby environment, but quickly adapted and were able to join in,” Winters said. “It was a nice personal atmosphere to really provide everyone with context for what they saw onstage.”
“Some audience members who had really experienced the climate of the 60's even shared their experiences with us and commended us on a job well done,” Poole said.
The KCACTF respondent who attended “Down in Mississippi” was also impressed.
Poole said it felt “fantastic” to see her group’s work honored by the KCACTF, and that she enjoyed the reward for putting aside her own reservations about her theatrical abilities.
“If I would have let my fear of performing in front of a crowd deter me from participating in the ‘Down in Mississippi’ lobby performance, then I never would have been able to have that great learning experience, or be able to say that I was a part of a performance that earned a certificate of merit from the Kennedy Center.”