‘Colorblind: The Katrina Monologues’

Indian Head Black Box stages perspective on disaster

Friday, March 21, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Submitted photo Michael Baytop will be performing at the Indian Head Black Box Theatre as part of the ‘‘Katrina Monologues.” E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo Musician and playwright Tom Flannery

‘‘I had written prior to [doing] ‘The Katrina Monologues.’ I had written probably six or seven plays,” Flannery said in a phone conversation. ‘‘I was just like everybody else watching it on television – kind of with my mouth hanging open, stunned at what I was seeing. I had to do something, anything. I couldn’t just sit here, and I couldn’t get in my car and drive down there.”

And write he did. Flannery took what he saw on the television and turned it into people. From an elderly dead man to a child age 6 reading what his elders told him to read, the personalities who died and survived the havoc in New Orleans come very much to life in ‘‘Colorblind: The Katrina Monologues,” opening March 27 at the Black Box Theatre at the Indian Head Center for the Arts.

‘‘History in general and current events are what interest me,” Flannery said. ‘‘These are things that people tend to not want to address anymore. It may be the political climate or whatever. It’s easier to not address potential hot button topics like that. But I’d be bored writing about stuff that didn’t really matter.

‘‘If somebody asks you to become involved with something about Sudan, how could you say no? That’s how I got involved with all sorts of projects like that,” he explained.

‘‘I wrote it in the heat of the moment, while it was still going on. While it was written, there were still people missing.”

Flannery grew up in the coal regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Floods and mine cave-ins were commonplace. Trying to gather the knowledge he missed by not listening to elderly relatives while he was growing up, he dove into his family’s past and the local history and came up with the recording ‘‘Anthracite Shuffle.” That came after he wrote ‘‘Song about a Train” and released it in 1998.

‘‘I’d been writing songs and stuff before that,” he said with a chuckle. ‘‘That’s just when I thought I was decent enough to let other people hear it.”

Once he put the play up on the Web, Flannery was surprised when people wanted to stage it.

‘‘It was done up here three different times, before it was all over there,” he said. ‘‘We considered updating it, changing it to reflect the current conditions. We decided to let it stay as it was because that’s how the mindset was during those two weeks. There’s a lot of anger in there so we decided to let it go and be the way it was during that week.

It’s kind of like watching Disney World – it wasn’t real.

‘‘A lot of people just couldn’t believe what they were seeing. You felt terrible and eventually – it took a couple of days – you got pissed off. I think that was the reaction after a while,” Flannery said. ‘‘And as a writer, that’s a pretty good place to be.”

Now that the play is being performed more and more, Flannery hopes it will do some good.

‘‘The first time we did it, we did it up here for the American Red Cross. We’re just trying to raise awareness because there were still a lot of people that didn’t really realize the extent of not so much the physical devastation, but the overall devastation of what it did to our prestige in the world, the African American community,” he explained. ‘‘And so we tried..., we’re going to try to get people to understand what was happening those two weeks.”

Since its appearance, Flannery said, a performance was entered into a statewide competition and won second place in Scranton. Soon he got an e-mail from Bowie State University and the college performed it last year.

‘‘I was just as surprised as anybody they wanted to do it,” Flannery remarked. ‘‘I just kind of looked at it as something therapeutic that we did up here and that would be the end of it. But it was revived up here three times and then Bowie State and now down at the playhouse. It’s just kind of surprising.

‘‘Up here, being a predominantly white area, that’s why I called it ‘‘Colorblind.” The way it was really written, it really doesn’t matter when you come right down to it,” he said about his play. ‘‘It wasn’t so much a race issue as a class issue. If this happened in Appalachia, it would be the same thing. I don’t think they were left behind because they were black. I think they were left behind because they were poor. You can’t ignore the race thing in this but I think this country is much more divided along class lines than the media would have you think.

‘‘Along the Gulf coast, they were largely black, but they were all poor. The fact that these people are still living in toxic trailers, and the Ninth Ward still looks like Bosnia after NATO, it’s a tragedy,” Flannery said.

Signing on to do the music under Bob Bartlett’s direction is well-known Washington, D.C., blues musician Michael Baytop.

Born in the District, Baytop moved to Fort Washington a few years ago but said he has always been a lifelong resident of the area.

‘‘I’ve always within a stone’s throw,” he said on the phone. Providing the music for ‘‘The Katrina Monologues” was the result of working with two people already involved: Felipe Harris, who plays one of the characters on stage, and Bartlett.

‘‘I had worked with Bob Bartlett before on a couple of projects and they were really good experiences,” he said. ‘‘They worked out pretty well for both of us. How I got involved with him was through one of the actors, Filipe Harris. I worked with him in a Silver Spring production of ‘‘I Am Man,” and he recommended me to Bob. That kind of started our working together.”

A dedicated blues musician now, he took to it a little later than most.

‘‘In musician years, really I started very, very late. I always listened to music at home and liked it, especially the blues, but I really didn’t start playing it until I was in my 30s and I started with the harmonica,” he explained. ‘‘In my late 30s, I picked up a guitar. I’d met Archie Edwards, a blues player, so I was inspired. At first, I wanted to see how a guitar worked, thinking it would make me a better harmonica player, but then I got fascinated with it.”

It was not a popular thought to start playing at his age.

‘‘Some guy told me that I needed to put down the guitar because I was too old to play guitar. He said I should stick to the bones and harmonica. And that made me mad,” he laughed. ‘‘So naturally, I did the opposite. When I go play at senior centers, people always say, ‘I wish I could do ... .’ I tell them you can do anything you want. The only limitation you have is your body.”

Baytop thought it was an awesome opportunity to participate in helping to define for people one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetime, he said.

Grandma Moses was 80 when she started, Baytop tells people.

‘‘Geronimo was 80 when he got mad and he went to his elder then. How old was his mentor? That just goes to show you ages Is not a barrier,” he said.

Baytop thought it was an awesome opportunity to participate in helping to define for people one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetime, he said.

The musician has done a lot of preparation for the show and is looking forward to merging his efforts with the playwright, director and performers.

‘‘I’ve been reading the script. I’ve been doing some research online and I’ve got a big library of songs on my computer, trying to find songs that will work,” he said. ‘‘Then I just fit the songs and moods with the actions.

‘‘Throughout history, people have done things to commemorate big events, not just catastrophic, but monumental,” Baytop said. ‘‘Traditionally in the African cultures it was done through song. And this is being done with a multi-media approach. Someone wrote a play, someone wrote a song, someone took a picture. It’ll be very exciting.”

The production is under the direction of Bob Bartlett and stars Nicole Carter, Rhonda Carter, Charmian Crawford, Felipe Harris and Jared Shamberger. Performances will run through April 6 and a portion of the proceeds will be turned over to the Southern Maryland Chapter of the American Red Cross.