Parallel Lives doesn't go far enough. What might have been a hard-hitting, revelatory exposé of the Jim Crow years in Florida is instead a sketchy, only occasionally powerful series of scenes and monologues that, well-meaning as it is, usually promises more than it delivers. The play suffers further from an imbalance. While its African-American character seems representative of blacks generally who were victimized by the evils of segregation, its white character is a minister's daughter who never fully sided with the ordinary bigot in the street. So a fundamental effect of Jim Crow — the deforming of the white mind, the poisoning of average white citizens on the subject of black humanity — is removed from discussion just when it should be most pertinent.
One has to applaud St. Petersburg Times columnist Bill Maxwell and novelist Beverly Coyle for bringing Parallel Lives to the stage, but the present, sporadically incisive version just whets the appetite for a more intense, more searching experience. What we need on this subject is the type of honesty that's therapeutic, the opportunity for catharsis. What we need are two characters who really represent Jim Crow divisions.
The play, which is based on essays written by Maxwell and Coyle for the Florida Humanities Council, begins with a phone call from "Beverly" to "Bill," in which she is gregarious and he standoffish. Then the memories begin: a series of monologues, one after the next about early awareness of racial separation. From time to time, the monologues end and we watch Bill and Beverly encounter each other as adults or, more specifically, as the writers asked to reminisce about their early years. In these segments, Beverly is enthusiastic about making a connection and Bill is skeptical, critical and sometimes downright angry. He thinks Beverly doesn't really understand an African-American's experience, the vigilance he has to show in the most seemingly innocent conditions: "I have to be awake every minute. … completely wide awake; otherwise I will be annihilated."
She thinks he's being hypersensitive, perhaps paranoid. These segments of the play are the most conventionally dramatic, but there's something wrong in their calibration. They never quite convince us that we're watching a relationship in the making. Still, they have their moments — as when Bill tells Beverly that "99.9 percent of you still don't have a clue about race in 2003, and I'm sick of having to either humor you or teach you." Or when he says, "I'll be committing one of the most dangerous acts in America: 'driving while black.'" If these sections don't quite add up, at least they make for a useful counterpoint to the autobiographical monologues. And they remind us that Jim Crow isn't as dead as we'd like, that he hangs on in the battered psyches of many of our citizens.
In any case, the emotional center of the play is in the monologues, not the dialogues, and in the stories — regrettable, shameful — about white mistreatment of blacks. These tales are all told by Bill, though. Beverly, having never taken on the role of victimizer, can't "parallel" her fellow character here. Bill remembers delivering newspapers at age 9, when three white boys in a car drew alongside him and threw a balloon filled with urine into his face; he admits that afterward, for the first time in his life, he felt murderous. Or he remembers the racist deputy sheriff who manhandled him when, at age 14, he went to the courthouse to get his driver's license. And he admits that by his senior year in high school "I hated white people so much that my folks thought of shipping me off to Harlem."
These reminiscences are among the play's most powerful moments, but they're moments that have little relation to Beverly's past. So, wandering from the subject, she talks about atomic bomb drills she had to go through at school or about her feelings about her physical appearance as she entered puberty.
While Bill recalls standing up to a white insurance agent who was making himself too familiar to the young man's grandparents, Beverly can offer only her crush on singer Johnny Mathis — or at least on his picture on album covers. And far from being a victim, conscious or otherwise, of the philosophy of segregation, Beverly remembers participating in a church program that made "shoebox gifts" for black migrant workers, or dreaming of becoming a missionary in Africa, or being forbidden by her father to attend a minstrel show in Fernandina Beach because it made fun of African-Americans.
Again and again, she shows herself to have been at least relatively tolerant. And so repeatedly the ostensible point of the show — to reveal segregation from a typical black and white perspective — is, at least on one side, largely lost.
The acting in the show is also inconsistent. Deborah Mayo as Beverly is just fine — dignified, scholarly, ready at every moment to stand her ground — but Robert Colston as Bill oscillates between admirable command and moments of hesitation, as if he's not sure of his next word. Constance McCord's direction is simple and straightforward, but Daniel Talpers' set, of an office and a living room on either side of a wicker sofa, is too rudimentary, and it actually detracts from the show's effectiveness. In fact, there's a low-budget starkness to the whole production, and it keeps us from feeling the detailed reality of what's being described.
Still, this is a creditable attempt to address a difficult subject. Racial prejudice is an unhealed wound on the American psyche, and we need to examine it, analyze it, bring it out into the open. Then maybe we'll have a chance to put it behind us.
So even with its failings, there's something hopeful about Parallel Lives.
Actors Alert
Time is running out for actors to file their applications for inclusion in the Florida West Coast Theatre Alliance annual auditions, to be held at Ruth Eckerd Hall's Marcia P. Hoffman Performing Arts Institute in Clearwater on Monday, June 30. The deadline for submission of completed applications is June 6. The Alliance is seeking Equity and non-Equity professional actors; diversity is encouraged. Nineteen Florida West Coast professional-producing organizations participated in the 2002 Alliance auditions, and a similar turnout is expected this year. To acquire an application (in a hurry), go to the Ruth Eckerd Hall website (www.eckerdtheatercompany.com). And considering the late date, you'd better hand-deliver the filled-out form to the people at the administrative entrance to Ruth Eckerd Hall.
What are you waiting for?
Pleasin' Season.
Tampa's Stageworks has just announced its 2003-04 season, and it looks to be one of their best.
The season begins (precise dates haven't yet been announced) with Chekhov's The Seagull, a brilliant examination of lives in the arts that features a mother-son relationship that might make Oedipus blush. Next is Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated (rights still pending), about six innocent people who were accused of heinous crimes, put on death row, and then — mercifully — freed. Stageworks intends to use a rotating cast featuring notable actors and personalities from the Tampa Bay area. After this comes Tampa playwright Kim Hanna's impressive comedy Hypoxia Zone, about three good friends — Geena, Eve and Leigh — who enjoy a relaxing (and revelatory) weekend reunion on an undeveloped island just off the Florida coast. And finally, one of Noel Coward's very best plays, Design for Living, comes to Tampa. The witty frolic is about painter Otto, playwright Leo and impulsive decorator Gilda, and their romp through Paris, London and New York in search of true love.
Congratulations to artistic director Anna Brennen. This is one of the most attractive line-ups I've ever seen Stageworks propose. I'm already impatient!
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2003.
