Susan Jackson rehearses Central Works’ “Bamboozled.”
During a recent rehearsal for Central Works’ “Bamboozled,” actor Susan Jackson mentioned that she’s a descendant of Confederate Army commander Stonewall Jackson.
Jan Zvaifler, the Berkeley theater company’s co-director, wanted to know how it was possible that the group had been through months of workshops on a show about Civil War memorabilia and modern-day race relations without that factoid coming out.
Jackson’s response: “I’m ashamed.”
Playwright Patricia Milton was spurred to write “Bamboozled” from a similar feeling — one that she argues many Americans share and that as a country we urgently have to reckon with.
Though Milton, 63, is a San Francisco native, her family is from Tennessee, and she grew up with her “granddaddy,” whom the family always called “The Colonel,” living in the apartment below hers. “He was a member of the Sons of the Confederacy.” At her school, Star of the Sea in the Richmond District, that heritage “was not a good thing,” she recalls before a recent “Bamboozled” rehearsal at the Berkeley City Club, where the show begins performances Saturday, Feb. 17, directed by company co-director Gary Graves.
Milton sees that dynamic reflected in lots of families right now — different members whose “values are not aligned.” But “to write a play, I feel like you need almost a metaphor or an object,” so she did her research and took as inspiration the mid-1990s case of George Juno and Russ Pritchard, “Antiques Roadshow” appraisers who defrauded the antiques-wielding descendant of Confederate Major General George Pickett, who led Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. (George E. Pickett V was later awarded $800,000.)
Americans, Milton says, “have memorabilia in our attic that haunts us. We have to figure out what to do about it.” In “Bamboozled,” which is set in Collierville, Tenn., it’s not just memorabilia that haunts but also Civil War monuments. She thought that was also a “really good metaphor of taking down racist structures.” It’s “something that America needs to do — not just the granite ones, but all the other ones that are invisible and are affecting people’s lives.”
Milton’s rendering injects race into the fraud case, with a black antiques expert, Abby (Jeunée Simon), who’s about to stand trial for undervaluing the heirlooms of a white Civil War re-enactor, Opal Anne (Jackson). But Milton was acutely aware of her limitations as a white playwright with a story about race in her imagination. “For a long time, I didn’t even write it. I was afraid to write it. I felt like, ‘Is this my story to tell?’
“I did come down on the side of yes, barely, for a couple of reasons. I think it is an American story that affects all of us.” Additionally, “I read probably a dozen plays by white writers, mostly men, about racial subjects,” and she found a couple of discouraging patterns. One was that plays devolved into jokes; another was that they moved toward “a racial slur that begins with ‘n’ that everybody spews ... and I was like, that is really not it. That is a part of it, but why is nobody talking about the structures?”
That might suggest “Bamboozled” is heavy,