A dialogue on race takes center stage
By Bill Maxwell, Role Models Today Publisher and Columnist for the St. Petersburg Times.
July 8, 2003

For three weeks, I enjoyed one of the greatest experiences in a writer's life: Hundreds of people streamed into a theater, paying $20 to $30 a ticket, to see a play that I co-authored. From May 23 through June 15, Parallel Lives, the 90-minute, autobiographical dramatic work Beverly Coyle and I wrote, had its world premiere at American Stage in St. Petersburg.

This experience always will be significant for me because a play may very well be the most interpersonal of the performing arts. I had the honor of sitting in the theater observing people watching a work that I helped to create.

In a sense, I was an omniscient god, the creator. I knew all the dramatic lines, the music, the lighting cues, the shadows on the set, the movements and positions of the actors and their quirks. Unlike members of the audience, I always knew what was going to happen next - and why.

I watched and listened to people's reactions to what they saw and heard - their winces, their squirms, their sighs, their laughter, their groans, their tears, their curses. I knew the second the final scene had ended, when the stage would blacken for the last time, when the moment came to applaud and leave the playhouse.

All the while, during each performance I attended, I literally pinched myself. How could I be a member of the team that created this living work, one that would affect some theatergoers for the rest of their lives?

What I have said above represents half of my Parallel Lives experience at American Stage. The other half of my experience were the "talkbacks" following several performances, when the audience, playwrights, actors and director discussed the play and related topics.

Set during the Jim Crow era, Parallel Lives is a saga about race in America. One part of the story begins with a simple telephone call between two strangers who are Florida natives, a black journalist and a white novelist. They are challenged to jointly accept a commission to write about their experiences as Florida children, sometimes nearly side-by-side, but never equal.

The other part of the story is their relationship while reading their essays on the road, in more than 40 cities, when they become friends, when they dare to tell each other about their private feelings on race and prejudice, when raw emotion brings them perilously close to physical confrontation.

The talkbacks invariably veered away from the structure of the play. People wanted to talk about race in one way or another.

And here is where I see the true value of Parallel Lives: It gives ordinary people a safe space to talk about race. The discussions mirrored what Americans are thinking, or not thinking, about race, and they reflected the messiness and nastiness of race - the irony, the unexpectedness, the predictability, the anger, the defensiveness, the ignorance, the fear, the sense of hopelessness, the recrimination and, of course, the denial.

I always held my breath when a white person from "up North," who considered herself or himself free of racial prejudice revealed in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they had race problems like the rest of us. I secretly cheered when a white person acknowledged that he or she has racial prejudices. And, for sure, I loved hearing a white person show understanding of white privilege - that being white per se gives a person a real advantage in a society where blackness is held in contempt. These people demonstrate an enlightenment that could transform the race dialogue in America for the better.

The presence of a single black person in the audience was a pleasure for me. Why very few attended the performance will be the subject of a column in the near future. But those who attended shared valuable insights that will serve all of us, black and white. None of the talkbacks had the kind of explosive anger that shuts down so many attempts to discuss race, including President Clinton's attempt to do so on the national level.

Again, I am honored that hundreds of theatergoers saw Parallel Lives, a project the Florida Humanities Council conceived in 1999. None of us knew then that two simple essays would evolve into a dramatic work that would be received so well, that would provide a forum for confronting the nation's most significant and enduring burden.

In a letter, one white theatergoer said that Parallel Lives reminded him of H.G. Wells' comment on race prejudice and made him commit himself to making a positive difference. Wells: "There is no more evil in this world than race prejudice. . . . It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world."

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