William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Now, that theme is applied to the Black experience in America as the nonprofit Perisphere Theater stages “Blue Door” at the Silver Spring Black Box Theatre now through March 12.
“Everyone is familiar to some extent with slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, but this play really puts you in the mind of one person and the people closest to that person, so it gives you a different insight into it,” Artistic & Executive Director Kevin O’Connell told WTOP.
Written by Tanya Barfield, the premise is similar to the ghosts visiting Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” only this time it’s the actual dead relatives of the protagonist, a Black man who doesn’t think that the past has any bearing on his present life in 1995.
“The main character is a man named Lewis, a Black professor,” O’Connell said. “His wife, who happens to be white, has just left him, and the reason she gave for leaving is that he wouldn’t march in the Million Man March. That leads him to question a lot of things about his identity. He’s suffering from severe insomnia … and his ancestors start to visit him.”
The first relative to visit him is his great grandfather, Simon, a slave in South Carolina.
“We first see Simon in 1851 when he’s a young boy; he lives with his mother obviously on a plantation,” O’Connell said. “The title of the play, ‘Blue Door,’ comes from the Gullah Geeche tradition of painting a door blue to keep evil spirits out. At one point, it appears his mother, Ruby, is going to get sold at auction, so she tells Simon to paint the door blue.”
He’s next visited by his grandfather, Jesse, during the failure of Reconstruction.
“When Jesse is born, slavery has ended and Simon is a sharecropper,” O’Connell said. “Jesse witnesses the plantation owner cheating his father and the [Ku Klux] Klan coming to intimidate Simon into not voting. … He swears that when he gets the opportunity to vote, he’s going to do it. … Later in life, he’s unjustly imprisoned, working on a chain gang.”
Finally, we see his own memories of his father Charles and his brother Rex.
“Lewis and Rex play out scenes with Charles,” O’Connell said. “Charles witnesses the worst that happened to his father. It really shapes his life. When Lewis says he ‘tried’ to get good grades, he says, ‘Black people don’t try, Black people fail.’ He’s physically abusive, he has an alcohol problem … from the horrible thing he witnessed happening to his father.”
After experiencing all of the visions of his relatives, Lewis’ perspective is changed.
“The seed of the whole play is that Lewis believes the present is not dependent on the past,” O’Connell said. “He thinks it’s a crutch to say there’s a causality between the past and the present. What this night does is … it draws a very direct line from slavery through all of the other forms of American racism … and it becomes difficult for him to deny.”
His goal is that audiences will have the same awakening.
“I hope that people will identity with Lewis,” O’Connell said. “Lewis is constantly saying, ‘Why do we need to retell that story?’ … That’s very much like many people are. Everyone knows slavery … has taken place, but when you get it down to one person … it’s much harder to put it aside and say that’s something from a history book. It becomes personal.”
In fact, the play has only gained in power over time since it was written in 2006.
“It’s a 16 year old play, but I think it’s more relevant today,” O’Connell said. “We’ve had all of the Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, all these things have really brought it to the forefront, so I think it resonates even more today than when it was written.”
Listen to our full conversation here.
