Slavery in the shadow of Lincoln
Presidential Museum commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with Flight
THEATER | Zach Baliva
Playwright Charlayne Woodard has something in common with her characters. Like Oh Beah, Mercy, Ezra, Alma, and Nate – the five slaves in Flight’s ensemble – Woodard is compelled to tell a story. To do so, she had to dig through her own life…twice.
Woodard, who trained at Chicago’s Goodman School of Drama, is a member of The Actors Studio and a Tony-nominated performer who has appeared in Law & Order:
SVU, Unbreakable, and ER. Before all that, she came face to face with the horrors of slavery in an Albany library. “Slavery in the Americas was the most vicious of all slavery in all parts of the world. For the first time, slaves were seen as nothing more than animals,” she says via phone. Woodard splits most of her time between California and New York, where she just ended a stint as the title character in The Witch of Edmonton..
When Corey Madden of the award-winning youth theater program P.L.A.Y. commissioned Woodard to adapt Br’er Rabbit, she refused. But Madden persisted, and Woodard read the stories that sparked an interest in folklore. She set out to delve into her heritage once more. “I discovered this unbelievable folklore and that led me to African American folktales and slave narratives. The research sucked me in,” she explains. Again, Woodard hit the library – but this time from an adult’s perspective. Instead of Br’er Rabbit, she shifted gears to focus on historic material too compelling to ignore. “I saw in these tales the importance of storytelling and knew that even though we discuss hard themes these stories must be understood by children.” She spent the next two years researching and writing Flight, which opened at The Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, Calif., in January 2005.
Set on a pre-Civil War plantation, the play tells the story of five slaves whose wife and friend, Sadie, has been sold. Her young son, Jim (who remains unseen), scurries up a tree and refuses to come down. His dad and the others recite well-known stories in an effort to talk him down.
Woodard’s storyline borrows from the actual slave narratives and folktales that had such an impact on her. After Alma confesses to Nate that she failed to stop Mistress from selling Sadie, she presents a red wedding ring that was lost in the struggle. Woodard pulled the detail from her research. “My people wrote down what happened to them and we get to be witnesses to that in part through this play,” she says. Storytelling, Woodard explains, was an important device for African slaves for whom reading, writing, religion and native language were outlawed. The characters in Flight, the playwright says, “tell their stories until [Jim] gets his courage back. Until we all get our courage back.”
As an actor, Woodard knows her fellow thespians long for fun and demanding roles. At the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum’s Union Theater, co-directors Phil Funkenbusch and Ed MacMurdo have assembled a cast that rises to the challenge. Each of the five actors recount several stories and therefore must play many characters. Woodard says each actor must thrive as a “master storyteller” – which these five do superbly. Actor
