OF ONE BLOOD
Twenty-four years later, Alan Parker made a profoundly distorted movie about the events in Mississippi–Mississippi Burning–that made the civil rights movement look FBI-inspired and -endorsed. It all but forgot to mention that black people were doing something themselves to improve their lot in the south. Now, playwright Andrew White has come along to set the record straight with Of One Blood, a fairly accurate, often dramatic, sometimes self-indulgent retelling of the events leading up to the murders.
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The play begins on a lonely road in Mississippi. Chaney (Adrian Byrd), Goodman (Thomas J. Cox), and Schwerner (David Schwimmer) drive along that fateful highway indulging in the most idle of idle chatter, reminiscent of nothing so much as the long, boring conversations between the two cops on Adam 12 as they drove around their beat. Schwerner talks about how he’s decided to grow a beard since the locals all hate him anyway, and Goodman seems genuinely surprised that beards are associated with beatniks and intellectuals.
After a little more dawdling they decide, with mock spontaneity, to “give them”–meaning us–“some character development” before giving us some plot line. When Schwerner self-consciously calls his wife Rita (Eva Barr) onstage, she strides in from the wings like the next guest on the Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner Show. Rita’s entrance proves to be a turning point, however, for her story–mundane details and all–grounds the play in reality and brings out the drama inherent in the civil rights movement but totally lacking in the play’s first two scenes. Schwerner even steps down from on high and joins his wife as a real live character–not just an anchorman–in her flashback.
