African Continuum Flings Open the 'Blue Door' of History at Atlas

Lewis is a brilliant African American mathematician going through a crisis of the soul one sleepless night. As visiting spirits of his dead brother and ancestors take him back to the days of slavery and segregation, Lewis finally sees on whose shoulders he stands.

Such is the center of Tanya Barfield's 2004 play "Blue Door," which African Continuum Theatre Company will present tomorrow through May 3 at Atlas Performing Arts Center. Barfield sets the play's "present tense" in 1995, at the time of the Million Man March (Lewis's wife has left him because he refused to take part in that event).

In 2004, Barfield says, "1995 didn't feel that far away in terms of the one-dimensional stereotypical images of African Americans in the media. . . . If you had told me when I was writing the play that four years later we'd have elected a black president, I probably would have fallen out of my chair."

Now, Barfield sees her play "in the kaleidoscope of history."

"It was just a short time ago when if you were black and were doing well in school, you were said to be acting white. . . ." she says. "Within certain communities, there was great shame over the legacy of black people in history." But that view, Barfield notes, "doesn't have the same potency that it had before."

Walter Dallas, who ran Freedom Repertory Theatre in Philadelphia from its 1993 inception until 2007, is staging "Blue Door" for African Continuum. Dallas, who directed a fabled 1995 production of the late August Wilson's "Seven Guitars" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, notes that Barfield and Wilson both plumb "cultural memory, racial memory," but very differently. "August had a broader stroke. . . ." Dallas says. "In Tanya's play, she deals with the same issues, the same memories, but the idea here is more personal, more intimate."

In "Blue Door," Lewis has forgotten the "sacrifices that were made back in the 19th century . . . that led to the kind of success he is," says Dallas, who's a senior artist in residence at the University of Maryland's theater department.

African Continuum continues to put its administrative house in order, says the company's new executive director, JoAnn Williams. She says it can afford only one full production a year (it also holds readings and special events). Rather than pay a full-time artistic director, the company will have an artistic panel (on which Dallas will serve) that will choose programming.

Williams hopes African Continuum will be able to do two shows per season by 2011. "The infrastructure of the organization is a whole lot more secure than it was in the past," she says, "and that is very important for its survival."

'Anne and Emmett'

"We see these commonalities between two disparate people and two disparate oppressors," says Janet Langhart Cohen of the idea behind her first play, "Anne and Emmett." In this piece for young audiences, Anne Frank and Emmett Till, both young victims of murderous hatred, meet in the limbo of memory and draw lessons from each other.

Scenes from Langhart Cohen's still-evolving piece will be performed Monday at the Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts (733 Eighth St. NW) at a benefit for the school's Send a Kid to Theatre Camp program. The former TV journalist-personality and her husband, William Cohen (defense secretary under Clinton and a former Republican senator from Maine), will co-host the event. (http://www.theatrelab.org/sendakid09.asp)

The play features an original score by 16-year-old violinist-composer Joshua Coyne, son of Theatre Lab Associate Director Jane Coyne. "Anne and Emmett" will be presented to the public at George Washington University on June 12.

"Some people have Dick and Jane. Anne and Emmett shaped me," says Langhart Cohen, who grew up in an Indianapolis housing project and as a teenager learned of the 1955 lynching of Till, a teenager from Chicago, in Mississippi. "He shaped my life on how my country thought of me as a person of color," she says. Then she was assigned to read "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl," which, she says, "shaped my view on humanity."

Langhart Cohen wants to teach young people about the history of African Americans and European Jews and to remind them that Jews and blacks in this country "fought [for civil rights] together." She argues that while we are "encouraged to remember the Holocaust and hold it sacred, blacks are expected to 'get over it,' " when it comes to the memory of slavery, segregation and lynchings.