Tuesday, April 25, 2000

This show hit me like a tidal wave.

"When I Grow Up I'm Gonna Get Some Big Words," a new work playing at Seattle Children's Theatre, is a powerful exercise in oral history. Playwright Deborah Lynn Frockt has mined memoirs, autobiography and printed interviews. Her gleanings evoke the American civil-rights movement. She shows events that were sometimes heroic and sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and sometimes uplifting (and always infuriating to white supremacists).

The bubbling up of freedom, equality and justice some 30, 40 or 50 years ago comes across with a force that can be overpowering. The Birmingham bus strike, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the Selma voter registration drive -- their evocation can release an emotional flood.

Director Linda Hartzell achieves sensational effects with minimal techniques. A few old photographs, some songs from "the movement," chairs, stools, a bench and inspired actors do wonders. Setting is by Philip R. Hendren. Sound is by Karl Mansfield.

Actor Barry Scott has for years immersed himself in the speeches and writings of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like a jazz musician developing a theme, Scott explores, at first in a casual way, the ideas inherent in a speech or sermon. Then there's a quickening. It's as if a spark has set the assembled materials on fire. And then -- voom! -- there's this blaze of inspiration and passion.

King's ideas come through clearly. His devotion to Tolstoy and Gandhi and his commitment to non-violence are as lucid and simple as they were (and are) revolutionary.

Playing dozens of characters who were part of the prelude and the apotheosis of the civil-rights movement are Dawn Frances, Demene Hall, Jimi Ray Malary, Ron Simons and Brandon Vaughan. Their collection of vignettes gives colorful testimony to a sometimes motley historical moment.

Frances shows rebellious youth finding discipline and maturity through the rigors of non-violence. Malary sometimes represents violence as a traditional faith and practice. Hall and Simons provide assurance there was fun and adventure to be had in what sometimes seems like a very serious and painful American epic. Vaughan, a sixth-grader, brings in a sense of legacy. His presence asks, "Now what?"

Frockt's text reminds us that toward the end of his life King was focusing on "poverty amid plenty." When he was shot, he was planning an interracial poor people's march on Washington. Poverty, of course, is still part of our "unfinished business." Some people are hungry. Some have no health care. Some go to terrible schools. Some live in dreadful housing. Some are overwhelmed by toxins and violence. The scope is global.

In 50 years, someone like Frockt may well put together a powerful dramatized oral history about an epical 21st-century struggle for economic justice.

Big Words

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