The dream lives on
A new play introduces the lessons of Dr. King to a new generation.
BY JOHN LONGENBAUGH
WHEN WE TRANSFORM a person into a saint, we lose much of our understanding of what makes them human. Modern biography tends to concentrate on shattering our illusions about heroes and saints by focusing on their human frailties to such an extent that it's hard to see why they were ever venerated in the first place. How, then, can we teach the lessons of our great leaders without making them either unapproachable or despicable?
Seattle Children's Theater's production of When I Grow Up I'm Gonna Get Some Big Words, subtitled "A Life With Martin Luther King Jr.," is a wonderful example of doing the job right. Deborah Lynn Frockt's meditative script presents King as a man not in heroic isolation, but as a leader who both inspired and drew inspiration from those who followed him.
It's a formidable task to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement in under two hours, particularly when for most of the theater's audience Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Rides, and even the water hoses and attack dogs of the Alabama police are ancient history. But Frockt's tactic of switching back and forth between the writings of King (performed by actor Barry Scott, whose voice is uncannily similar to the great leader) and the reminiscences of dozens of other protesters, both famous and obscure, gives an elegant framework to the events.
PERHAPS THE GREATEST revelations of this material are how much preparation and work went into training the protesters in the doctrine of nonviolence and how Dr. King's initial calls for passive resistance were hotly debated. Reactions range from a man who angrily claims that he'll meet their firearms with his own .38 to a woman who calmly states that it might be necessary to kill a certain number of whites for their message to be taken seriously. That such violence remained on the far periphery of King's movement, and that time and again armed mobs were met with nothing more than dignity, solidarity, and song, seems miraculous in retrospect.
The latter part of the play rushes to get in the last few years of the movement, from the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Church to King's assassination in 1968; but overall the production is still immensely strong. The single question most often asked by children in the after-show discussion was, "Did this all really happen?" That this needs to be asked at all demonstrates just how timely and valuable this production is.
