PERFECT DUET
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On a bare stage decorated with only a few platforms and stools, the six Black Ensemble Theatre members construct a survey of events, beginning in the mid-50s with the integration of the public schools and Rosa Parks’s bus ride through Montgomery. This is accomplished through songs of the era: Sam Cooke’s “Change Is Gonna Come”; Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”; and, somewhat surprisingly, Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati’s “People Got to Be Free” (Cavaliere and Brigati, members of the Rascals, declared in 1968 that they wouldn’t play at any concert that didn’t include at least one black act).
There are also first-person monologues. “When I was alive, my name was Emmett Till,” a young man announces, drawing a murmur of recognition from the audience. Other portraits include one of the four children killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, a student participating in her first sit-in (at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, where hostile bystanders spit on her, throw food at her, and burn her with cigarettes), and a black businessman who disapproves of the protesters’ actions until he witnesses a demonstration in which attack dogs and fire hoses “so powerful they tore the bark from the trees” were used on the crowds. A group piece depicts the panic that grips a busload of freedom riders who discover their media escort has deserted them and they are at the mercy of their attackers. Dividing the various episodes are the stirring words of Dr. Martin Luther King making his pleas for progress with compassion. “As a race, we must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship, but we must never use second-class methods to gain it,” he stresses, advice endorsed enthusiastically by shouts of “Amen” and “Allah” from the audience.
