A SHARED HISTORY
‘ In To America’ immigrant narratives paint portrait of America’s cultural melting pot
Immigration, the issue that’s currently among the hottest topics not only in the United States but around the world, is also front and center in Griffin Theatre’s next offering “In To America,” a new work in which playwright and company artistic director Bill Massolia looks to the past in an attempt to illustrate the bigger picture.
Massolia’s journey began a couple of years ago when he began researching his Italian roots — both sets of grandparents were immigrants.
“I was just trying to find out if my grandparents became naturalized American citizens because that family information had always been spotty,” Massolia says. With help from the National Archives, a depository for government records, he discovered his paternal grandfather never naturalized.
“Apparently, around the turn of the 20th century, there were just so many immigrants coming into the country it was hard to keep track of everybody,” Massolia says. “He was illegal his entire life in this country.”
So it was a no brainer that Massolia connected his granddad’s story to the ongoing and often rift debate about immigration today. “In To America” is patterned after another of Massolia’s plays, “Letters Home,” which is composed of actors reading letters from soldiers serving in the Middle East. In the new play, a cast of 13, under the direction of Dorothy Milne, offers accounts from writings and oral histories by immigrants going back to America’s beginnings. Projections are used to set the time and place and introduce who is speaking.
“When you think about it, it’s pretty much the one shared history that everybody in this country has,” Massolia says adding, “So I thought I would create a play that would trace that history. I think people will find stories here that they can connect to their own personal history.”
“In To America” features more than 60 personal immigrant narratives that weave together America’s multicultural story. Included are accounts from as early as Jamestown and the Revolutionary War to the California gold rush, the Civil War, the building of the transcontinental railroad and on into modern times. Most are the words of ordinary people but there also recollections from authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Anita Desai, actress Phylicia Rashad and John H. Johnson, founder of Johnson Publishing Company.
“In To America” is the middle entry in Griffin’s season dedicated to the immigrant experience, which began with “Winterset,” the story of two Italian immigrants who were executed for a crime despite insubstantial evidence, and concludes with a new chamber version of the Tony Award- winning “Ragtime,” a musical set at the dawn of the 20th century.
Massolia says burying himself in research was “a great eye- opening learning experience.” As he worked his way through the history of immigration in America, it became obvious that whether it was a backlash aimed at Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, Germans or Poles not much has changed.
“Unfortunately, today’s immigration issues aren’t really all that different,” he notes, adding, “We are in another one of those moments when people are afraid and ostracizing the other.”
This prejudice against i mmigrants really does go back to our country’s early roots as evidenced by an unsettling quote from Benjamin Franklin that Massolia came across and includes in the play: “Few of their children know English. They import many books from Germany. They will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have, we will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious!”
“I don’t think people know a lot of this history unless you were an American history major in college,” Massolia says. “America was built on the backs of immigrants who were there at every major point in our history.”
Milne finds it sad that “through all this history we seem to have learned nothing.” But she feels it’s through “the power of theater and storytelling that we get to see the world from a different perspective and broaden our own view.”
Adds Massolia: “What sticks out to me is that no one person owns the immigrant story. We all own it. And we should all be proud of that heritage. It makes you realize just how much the same we all are. Our ancestors came here for the same reasons. To escape poverty, to find prosperity, to give children a better chance. What it comes down to is we are all more alike than we are different.”
“I don’t think people know a lot of this history unless you were an American history major in college. America was built on the backs of immigrants who were there at every major point in our history.” — Bill Massolia, director