Eladio Banks (left)
and Raymond Ramirez in a play inspired in part by a Fenway teacher.
(Globe Photo / Jodi Hilton)
‘Union’ of students, actors puts local story onstage
Several young actors are running lines, scripts in hand, in a rehearsal room at the Calderwood Pavilion. With less than a week to go before their first preview, they're quickly trying to learn a slew of new material just given to them. Some sit on the floor, backs against the wall, faces furrowed with concentration.
Director Juanita Rodrigues, sitting behind a long table, gives them a pep talk, trying to calm their jitters. ''Don't freak out about the lines," she calls out.
There's a lot for them to be freaked out about. The production, which is being presented by Company One at Boston Center for the Arts, is the world premiere of nationally recognized playwright Kirsten Greenidge's ''A More Perfect Union." These actors, seven out of a total of 16 in the production, are not professionals, they're students at the Boston Arts Academy, a pilot high school in the Fenway. And they're setting foot on a downtown stage for the first time.
Then there's the buzz around the production. ''A More Perfect Union" is inspired in part by the story of popular Fenway High School teacher Obain Attouoman, whose near deportation to his native Ivory Coast was halted after Fenway students and teachers protested, here and in Washington. The academy shares the same building as Fenway High, and its students took part in the protests.
The play consists of several story lines, which all converge in a jail cell. An Eastern European mother is looking for her daughter, who's been held in sexual slavery. A 12-year-old African-American Hurricane Katrina victim begins to speak after a traumatized silence. An African-American prep-school student, pulled over and beaten by an Irish-Latino cop who's jealous of the kid's education, protests his treatment to the policeman. Attouoman is in there, too. Jailed for missing an immigration hearing, he talks about how his activism in Ivory Coast was making life dangerous for him there.
Interviewed after school, Attouoman says he's fine with the idea of a play being written about his situation. He's gotten a reprieve until 2007, and a bill to grant him permanent legal residence is pending in Congress, sponsored by Representative Edward J. Markey and Senator John Kerry. But he sees the major benefit of the play as being more for the students than himself. ''The kids are the main actors. It's an opportunity for them to play themselves. It's not something taken out of a book."
The instigator of the project was Rodrigues, a teacher at the academy. Two years ago, the school had put on a play called ''You Must Not Speak: The Language of Human Rights," in conjunction with the Brookline-based nonprofit foundation Facing History and Ourselves, about what happens when people don't speak up against human rights infractions.
''This year," she says before rehearsal, ''we decided it would be really interesting to look at the human rights violations now. What happens when you do speak up? When a group of people do this? And what is that journey from being disenfranchised to empowerment?"
With a grant from the Surdna Foundation, the academy commissioned Greenidge to write a play that would include Attouoman's story as one of several intertwined tales related to human rights.
The commission was challenging, says Greenidge (pronounced GREN-itch) over breakfast recently in a Cambridge hotel. '' 'You Must Not Speak,' " she says, ''was very rooted in political theater, documentary theater, and that's not necessarily what I usually do. And writing about someone who is alive is frightening; you don't want to get it wrong. So the choice was made early on to use Obain's story as information rather than trying to get a strict representation of his life."
The other characters in the play are not based on real people, she says. The Katrina refugee ''was based on several articles I read about a large number of young teenagers who were separated from their families" because the authorities felt, she says, ''the younger brothers and sisters needed to be with their parents, and there were too many of them to let the older kids stay. That struck a chord with me because it pinpointed the insensitivity [used with] the survivors."
The Eastern European mother looking for her daughter came from a case history in a United Nations account of sex trafficking. ''The mother finally found her. But the daughter was so traumatized by what had happened to her when she was a sex worker that she committed suicide."
Greenidge managed to have both a survivor of Katrina and a Boston high
school teacher inhabiting the same jail cell by setting the play in
what she calls a ''metaphysical America." This is not such an outlandish
notion when you realize that Greenidge had grass growing up through
the stage in another play, ''Sans-culottes in the Promised Land," which
was performed in 2004 at the prestigious
This is the first time the theater department of Boston Arts Academy has joined up with a professional theater company. The relationship developed because of a number of connections between the two groups. Company One artistic director Shawn LaCount teaches acting and producing at the academy. Rodrigues has also directed other Company One shows, including ''Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992." And Greenidge is the company's resident playwright; last year it produced her acclaimed ''103 Within the Veil." LaCount suggested her to Rodrigues.
LaCount says the relationship with the school works well for both it and his company ''because of the young, diverse population there that falls right in line with our mission." Some 50 students are involved with the production, either as actors or as interns, he says. A scaled-down version of the play, including some students, will travel to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.
Eladio Banks, a tall and rangy senior who plays the prep-school student in ''A More Perfect Union," was involved in the student protests on Attouoman's behalf.
''Being young, you don't really think your voice is heard," he says, ''but considering that all of us came together, it makes a bigger difference, so being out there I realized that I actually made a lot more of a difference.
''I like the fact that so many people know Obain and know the struggle he went through," Banks adds. ''And then I'm like, yeah, I'm in a show and involved in Obain's story. Not everybody has the opportunity to be able to perform a piece that's actually involving his story."
Doublas Theadore, one of the professional actors in the production, has the key role of Attouoman. In rehearsal, Theadore wears a crisp, tailored shirt, much like those the teacher is known to wear.
When asked how it feels to play such a revered figure, he says, ''Honestly? It's scary. I just hope I do him justice."