Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Making ‘The
Moment’ Now
Gwen
McKinney
October
2, 2019
The
Washington Informer
The year was 1869.
Ruins of the Civil War are being swallowed in the swirl of Reconstruction.
Federal troops protecting the union victory and the newly emancipated slaves
have not yet withdrawn from the South. The promise of America in the dawn of
the industrial era is tangible.
Our story opens in
Baltimore with Frederick Douglass (LeCount R. Holmes Jr.) calling a meeting of
key players to envision a new, free, democratic nation. Pioneering Black trade
unionist Isaac Myers (Darryl! LC Moch), organizing Black shipyard workers in Baltimore
and across the country, is joined by Irish-Catholic labor leader William Sylvis
(Ariel Jacobson). He had a vision of taking on the barons and plantation owners
on behalf of poor laborers in the north and south. Susan B. Anthony (Jenna
Rose Stein), considered the “Mother of Suffrage” was included to inject her
militant view of women’s equality through voting rights.
Moments after
Douglass leaves the three to their deliberations, an uninvited figure emerges
from the dark. She mounts the stairs. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Julia
Nixon) takes center stage. Acknowledging she was excluded, she affirms, “They
need me to make this right.”
For the next two
hours, rights, wrongs, race and justice are fused into a foot-tapping,
hand-clapping kaleidoscope of spoken word/rap, jazz, blues, gospel and musical
theater, animated in a lyrical montage through the lens of history.
The story takes
wings and soars.
The meeting in
Baltimore was imagined. But the characters were real. Their expressions came
from actual speeches of that era. The musical opened and closed with poetry
from Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again.”
A troupe of
classically trained actors, set developers and musicians turned out 15 musical
interventions with provocative themes complemented by 170 overhead slides
flashing archival footnotes and images.
The performance
enjoyed an air of authentically in the Emmanuel Episcopal Church (built in
1854) auditorium in downtown Baltimore. Seven performances, over two weekends
Sept. 13-22, left most patrons wanting more.
Creator Gene
Bruskin, a 73-year-old retired labor strategist, coined the show as “Theater
for the 99 percent.” Estimating the production took about two years from
conception to staging, he says the themes festered within him for decades,
inspired by the hopes and challenges of the Reconstruction era. This was
crystallized by W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction. It projected the
possibilities and agency of that period that disintegrated into the plunder of
white supremacy, labor exploitation, solidification of wealthy landowners and
division among the have nots and their best interests.
“That was a moment
when this nation had the chance to almost do the right thing,” Bruskin said.
“But like then, the moment is still now.”
He insisted that
2019 is a perfect backdrop to revisit the possibilities. Many key events have
catalyzed new awareness including the fomenting of White supremacy; heightened
conversation about reparations; 400 years since the arrival of the first
kidnapped Africans; 150 years since the 15th Amendment giving Black men voting
rights and a century since passage of the 19th Amendment for women’s voting
rights.
“Moments come and
moments pass. But you cannot freeze them if you do not seize them,” recited
Bruskin from his script.
The performance
has generated requests for a touring show to labor conventions, civic groups,
public schools and other venues where history and politics can find a marriage.
A film stream is also being planned on www.TheMomentWasNow.com.
Created by Gene
Bruskin in collaboration with artistic director Darryl! LC Moch, Musical
Director Glenn Pearson and Assistant Musical Director Chester Burke
When Julia Meets
Frances
When Broadway
actress Julia Nixon met poet, abolitionist, suffragist Frances Ellen Watkins
Harper, she felt certain she had unlocked a treasure box.
“My first thought
was that this woman was a fictitious character,” Nixon said. “My second
thought, when I realized she actually existed, was OMG!”
From there, she
would take a journey through poetry, history and the lived experience in the
footsteps of a woman revered as “the Mother of Black American literature.”
Nixon, a recording
artist with a long-running stint at the popular D.C. supper club Mr. Henry’s,
recently completed a two-week run of the musical “The Moment Was Now.” She
confides that “living in Frances Harper’s skin” gave her new inspiration about
Black women’s power then and now.
Staged in
Baltimore at the historic Emmanuel Episcopal Church, “The Moment” takes us back
to 1869. Harper was one of five historical characters featured in the show,
which also included orator Frederick Douglass (LeCount R. Holmes Jr.) and
suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony (Jenna Rose Stein).
The two-hour
musical was a potent slice of American history, shining a light on hypocrisy,
democracy and possibilities that confronted the country in the late 19th
century. Reconstruction, women’s voting rights, the industrial revolution,
labor rights and true emancipation of Black people were on the table.
But the big story embedded
in the play explores suffrage, race and power — a complex and intractable
conundrum that haunts us today.
As the nation
marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women voting rights
next August, the lessons of Frances Harper and a cadre of Black suffragists of
the 19th and early 20th centuries are a reminder of the schism between White
feminism and Black liberation.
Harper, like many
of her contemporaries, was an ardent advocate of universal suffrage. It was
inseparable from abolition of slavery and full emancipation of all people
beyond the act of voting.
Through a rousing
performance in “The Moment,” Julia Nixon demonstrates Harper’s connection with
Anthony’s cause (“I’m A Woman”) and the split when Black suffragists throw down
the gauntlet with Black men, granted voting rights through adoption of the 15th
Amendment (“Not a Straw in the Way”).
Harper (1825-1911)
lived a full and productive life. The first known Black woman to publish a
short story (“Two Offers,” 1859), her poetry collections have been republished
hundreds of times. Harper joined with other Black women including Harriet
Tubman and Ida B. Wells to establish the National Association of Colored
Women’s Clubs in 1896. That organization, which rarely gets the recognition it
deserves, was the forerunner of the NAACP.
Songstress Nixon,
herself a poet and playwright, enjoyed a four-year run on Broadway after the
departure of Jennifer Holiday, playing Effie in “Dreamgirls.” Her four-octave
range equips her with the acumen to traverse musical genres including jazz,
gospel, blues urban funk and musical theater.
“This conversation
takes me back to the late 1960s and early 1970 in Robinson County, North
Carolina,” Nixon reflects. “I was part of the first wave of Black children to
integrate the all-white schools in our town. I knew racial hostility
firsthand.”
Acknowledging that
her experience pales in comparison to the journey of the post-slavery period
captured in “The Moment Was Now,” Nixon said, “All I can say is thank you,
Frances. You woke me up.”
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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