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Ron Milner & Project Revival |
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Friday, 10 February 2006 04:43 |
Project Revival
Playwright Ron Milner Goes Back into the Public Schools
By John Sinclair
Detroit's premiere playwright, Ron Milner, a product of Southwestern High School, has experienced success on every level, from community-based theatrical productions to his recent Broadway smash, Don't Get God Started. But he has never abandoned his roots on Hastings Street, the erstwhile Main Street of Detroit's African-American community, where he grew up in the 1940s and 50s before moving on to international fame as one of America's foremost dramatists.
Throughout his career, starting at Detroit's Concept East Theatre in the early 60s, Milner has maintained a commitment to the community which nurtured him, returning repeatedly to work with young people in the Detroit public schools in an attempt to pass on his hard-gained knowledge and experience to new generations of struggling youth.
Ron Milner first gained national attention with the American Place Theatre production of his play Who's Got His Own in 1965. His powerful drama of street life, What the Wine-Sellers Buy, toured nationally in 1975 after runs at the New Federal Theatre in New York City, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and NY's Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1973-74. Seasons Reasons, a dramatic musical, was staged by the National Black Touring Circuit in 1980, and Ron's Jazz-Set was named one of the Top Ten Best New Plays of 1979. His contemporary drama, Checkmates, was a Broadway hit in 1988 and toured nationally this year, following the success of his gospel musical, Don't Get God Started, which also toured the country after packing them in at Broadway's Longacre Theatre during the 1987-88 season.
One of Milner's favorite theatrical experiences, though, was the "special social documentary" Work: Don't Let Your Attitude Intrude, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor for the Detroit public school system in 1974 and utilized as a practical training program in the schools for the next three years. His youth-oriented production, Crack-Steppin' (1981), also involved Detroit public school students as cast members and played to high-school audiences during the 1981-82 season.
Now busy working on his script for an international dramatic tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., which will open next year in London before touring Europe with an all-star cast, Ron Milner is struggling to find time and raise money for a new youth program, Project Revival, designed to help high-school students deal with contemporary social problems by involving them in a dramatic production staged in the schools with student actors. The production will be followed by a two-hour counseling session in which the student actors and audience members will interact with professionally-trained counselors to explore the themes introduced in Milner's play.
I met with Ron Milner at the Detroit Council of the Arts recently and asked him to discuss Project Revival and his motivation for taking on this difficult project.
Ron Milner: About 12-14 years ago I did a thing called Work: Don't Let Your Attitude Intrude, which was about helping kids get past the cultural shocks so they could do interviews to get jobs--just basic things like being aware of the cultural differences between the inner-city youth and the average employer so these things will not stand in the way of being employable.
For example, coming in wearing a big hat--you have to be careful about wearing this big hat because it might denote certain negative things to the job interviewer, right? This piece ran for three years in the Detroit public school system and went all the way to Washington, DC--in fact, they did a CBS-TV "White Paper" show on this program in 1979.
So now, looking around at all the youth problems we have at present, it just seems like time to see if we can go back into the schools and have some effect again. I live here in Detroit, I live here in the world, and these young people are either a potential good or a potential danger unless somebody actually deals with them and their problems. Somebody has to come in and say, what about going through the front door instead of through the back window all the time, you know? It seems like the only person really dealing with the kids in the neighborhoods now is the dope man, and that just can't go on without some kind of response.
So I think it's time again for artists to come and make themselves accessible to the situation they find in their communities. I remember talking to Langston Hughes once and he said, we artists should be writing the economic textbooks so they would make sense to the young people. It would also provide us with jobs and make us useful to the community. [Laughs]
I feel that if artists see a situation we have some insight into, then we ought to be able to address that situation in a clarifying way, so that, in this case, if young people see a script or play that mirrors their reality, they can also see how different people deal with the same problems they're faced with.
It's all about value choices and self-esteem, basically--the values involved in to do or not to do, rather than the old construct of to be or not to be. To sell or not sell dope--why not, if the bottom line is simply dollar bills? If our society tells them the bottom line is dollar bills and the BMW, why spend eight years in college when they can spend eight months on the streets selling dope and get the rewards in dollars? So it has to be about something else. That can't be the bottom line--the bottom line has to have something to do with community respect and building for the future of the community.
As far as the practicalities of the project are concerned, we are really looking for underwriters from the business community, from the community leadership and all those screaming "Crime!"--we expect some of them to come forward and facilitate this project. With the school board being in the situation it's in, we don't expect to get much financial assistance from that sector. The main thing we're looking for is to get other people to come on in with the support the project needs--all the people, from neighborhood residents to major corporations, who depend in some way on the finished product of the public school system.
For Project Revival, we will use student actors, auditioning them from the high schools where the project will be operated. It's totally peers. Some of these kids are trained actors--well, they're not well-trained actors now, but that's clearly the road they're going to be on. Some of the other kids are first-time actors. In this kind of audition you watch a kid come in and think about how he would be viewed by the other kids. Some kids come in who have always been the "teacher's pet," always been involved in the arts, and the kids listen to them as well.
Then there's the kid with the cap on backwards and gym shoes untied. You need some of these kids too, because they represent the reality of the kids, the kind of person they're going to brush up against out there. And sometimes these are also the brightest kids in the group.
Often in the ghetto existence kids are trapped by their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Because a kid is not afraid he will wade right in and take whatever he can get. He's willing to pay for it, he's got the heart and the brain and the cleverness--he can create and run a structured organization in the streets, he can do a whole bunch of things. He can think on his feet. He can figure out systems. But he's taking the immediate road and there's a cage waiting for him at the end of it. Now if he's a little bit leery or a little bit frightened, he may draw back and think, "I'd better go to the library."
One kid's weakness saves him, another kid's strength traps him. All of these things are at play out there. It's difficult. That's why the artist can't go into the counseling room alone with the student--you have to have a trained counselor, and the counselor can't go in alone because he needs the artist to help him communicate with the kids.
Another thing this kind of show has to have is attractiveness. And attractiveness has to come in the form of music, rap, the certain costume that reads a certain thing--all these things attract the eye, and the ear follows. Sometimes it attracts the ear--when it gets into the music, then the mind follows. This is a much more difficult kind of thing to write than a Broadway show, because you have to deal with a whole different language and range of concerns and try to get across to people who are coming to your play from a very different place.
The greatest fear of these young guys out there is not what happens to them but what happens to their families because of them. So you have to get to these kinds of suggestions and these kinds of answers in the script, and then follow up on the script by having these same role-model actors step down from the stage and confront the students who made up their audience in the conference room for two hours afterwards. The actors have also been trained in counseling, and the professional counselors are there in the room with them, so the actors are able to help the students approach the counselors with their problems.
The students are able to talk with the actors, who are their peers--like, "I identify with what you were doing on the stage, my man, can I talk to you about it?" And the actor says, "Yeah, let's go into the conference room and talk. Plus, there's somebody here who knows more about it than I do. And not only can you talk to them now, but they have a situation set up where you can come and talk to them on a regular basis if need be.... When you can't find your uncle, and your father's not there, and all you can hear is your peers confirming what you already know--which you know is not the way--why don't you talk to these people, or why don't you call this person? These people are there in the community and some of them are being paid to listen to you, so go talk to them."
The person speaking here is someone the student's own age, someone who's come out of the student's own environment. You just saw him rapping to you on stage a minute ago--you can approach him like you aren't going to approach some foreign adult, you know?
So this is the concept for Project Revival now, and I guess it follows what I've always felt, because I got into theatre as soon as I realized it was three-dimensional. Nothing else in the literary arts is a three-dimensional form, nothing else seems to be in the oral tradition--poetry was oral to a certain extent, but the poets I heard were locked into one voice, and you had to have some kind of initiation into the language arts to be able to get to the poet anyway. In the theatre it was storytelling, so it was accessible right from the start. That's how I got into theatre in the first place.
Every now and then you have to remember where you came from. You're sitting up on Broadway with Denzel Washington...you have these people in your cast: Denzel Washington, Paul Winfield, Ruby Dee, and it's so easy, and you're sitting there saying theatre is lovely, it's marvelous, and all that, and then you go back home to Day-twa, and you're sitting here in Day-twa, and you look out your window in Indian Village and you see these kids come by and you start hearing the things they're saying--what they're involved with--and they threaten your reality, and they are part of your reality, but you don't have any effect on them at all. They're not going to pay $60 to see a Broadway show--they don't even know you exist.
When I was coming up a role model for me was Gus Finney, who used to run the playground in our neighborhood, and then he eventually ran the Kronk Recreation Center. He was teaching softball, basketball and boxing, but he became a surrogate father for a lot of us from broken homes in those days. Gus Finney was such a stand-up, straight, play-by-the-rules, show-you-the-way-to-do-it kind of guy that he taught us much, much more than just playing sports.
There were a lot of Gus Finneys in the neighborhood then, but now people are afraid to be Gus Finneys because if they step out there, you know, what are you getting yourself involved in? You can't talk to other people's kids any more, because people get kind of nervous about that. But they're either going to be your kids or your enemy--that's what you've got to deal with, and that's one aspect of it.
Somebody asked me a couple of years ago, "Ron, you were doing this kind of thing in the 60s and now you're doing that"--i.e., staging plays on Broadway. And it dawned on me that what I wanted to do with my work was what Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes did: go everywhere the culture goes. When the culture has a nice Sunday school, then I would like to have a Sunday school play. I'd like to go everywhere, take some pictures, and every now and then toss out a valentine--something very, very sweet. It can't be all laughter and it can't be all glumness--people don't survive that way.
--Detroit
1989
Special thanks to Patricia Sinclair for her transcription of the interview.
(c) 1989, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
3.1.6108Detroit's premiere playwright, Ron Milner, is a product of Southwestern High School and has experienced success on every level, from community-based theatrical productions to his recent Broadway smash, Don't Get God Started.... [City Arts Quarterly]]]> |
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