In two solo performances last night, history was brought to life in compelling and hard-to-forget ways.
The first performance was Voices of the Spirits in My Soul, presented by the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art’s Seaport Salon.
The play is based partly on family letters and photographs of Nora Cole’s enslaved and free Kentucky ancestors. Cole wove these stories into the larger cultural narrative about black history. One moment, she is a 25-year-old slave who died too soon and imagines the lives of her family up to the present day. Another moment, she is a scared 15-year-old girl in Little Rock, Ark., on her way to integrate the local high school in the 1950s.
And then she is Coretta Scott King, figuring out how to tell her children that her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is dead.
Cole’s transitions from one character to the next were seamless. The only misstep was a spoken-word rant against gangsta rap that felt out of place and preachy. Other than that, she did a wonderful job connecting her personal history to that of black people as a whole—a history to be proud of and to cherish.
Mike Wiley also made history come to life in his one-man performance of Dar He: The Story of Emmett Till.
In it, he recounted the awful story of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi by two white men in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. Wiley ably portrays Till, who suffered from a stammer, as well as the two white men who killed him, his mother and Till’s great uncle, Moses Wright, who pointed out the white men in court in the Jim Crow South.
Archival news footage added a haunting reminder that this wasn’t just a performance; this was history that was all too real.
■ Michael Hewlett can be reached at 727-7326 or at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).