We review civil-rights-themed ‘Alabama Story’ at City Lights Theater.
Civil rights-themed ‘Alabama Story’ opens at City Lights
It’s hard to spend much time on social media nowadays without stumbling across small but loud pockets of outrage about the perceived political agenda behind blockbuster movies, comic books or other seemingly innocuous pieces of pop culture. This kind of hullabaloo isn’t nearly as new as one might like to think, as shown in “Alabama Story” at San Jose’s City Lights Theater Company.
This 2015 play by Kenneth Jones centers around a real-life incident that took place in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959, when the segregationist media and a state senator targeted the state librarian for the fact that the public libraries stocked a children’s picture book called “The Rabbits’ Wedding” by Garth Williams, the beloved illustrator of books such as “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.” The offending detail was that one
of the two rabbits getting married in the book had black fur, while the other had white fur, which was characterized by these vocal opponents as insidious integrationist propaganda.
Karen DeHart is unflappable and uncompromising as Emily Wheelock Reed, director of the Alabama Public Library Service Division, who calmly refuses demands to ban “Rabbits” from libraries statewide, because it’s a sweet and charming book that was on a list of notable published works by the American Library Association. Jeremy Ryan is indefatigably earnest, enthusiastic and efficient as her assistant Thomas, who’s far more worried than she is.
Erik Gandolfi is smoothly charismatic
and full of blustery rhetoric as state Sen. E.W. Higgins, a formerly enthusiastic library supporter (he keeps talking about his love for “Tom Sawyer”) who’s latched onto this manufactured outrage as his pet issue. Steve Lambert looks on with amused detachment as the picture book’s author, Williams, who never really enters the story as a character but acts as an occasional narrator and takes on other parts, such as a mild-mannered local newspaper reporter or Higgins’ weary and exasperated political mentor.
For a play about segregation in Alabama in the early days of the civil rights movement, the play curiously only has one AfricanAmerican character, and he’s not part of the main story but a parallel secondary story. Bezachin Jifar is a subdued and friendly young man as Joshua Moore, who runs into a white childhood friend (his mother worked for her parents) on the very segregated streets of Montgomery where every passerby eyes them suspiciously.
Maria Giere Marquis palpably layers a veneer of carefree amiability over a minefield of repressed feelings and memories as childhood playmate Lily Whitfield, who keeps pushing aside any unpleasant reminders of how unequally they’re treated, as thoughtlessly as she drapes her coat over the “whites only” plaque on the bench she’s sitting on when they run into each other.
Sometimes taking place onstage at the same time as the primary story, not much actually happens in Joshua and Lily’s thread. It’s more of an emotional journey of taking the blinders off and coming to terms with what happened in the past than it is about what changes in the “present” of 1959.
Executive artistic director Lisa Mallette gives the play a resonant and nicely paced staging for its West Coast premiere. Ron Gasparinetti’s spare set of Greek columns and a chained-up park gate gives just enough of a suggestion of the locations mentioned while keeping the space fluid and versatile. Sound designer and composer George Psarras provides a suitably languid score of slow and twangy acoustic guitar.
There are occasional elements that don’t quite click. Having the ensemble breathlessly repeat “Tell me a story” like eager children at the beginning and end of the play, is borderline mawkish. In its unsubtle way, however, even that part is a useful reminder that this is a segregation story that didn’t even have to be a segregation story. It was supposed to be a story about bunny rabbits.