Chris Berry had just flown in from New York to direct a play in Baton Rouge with New Venture Theatre. He went straight from the airport that Tuesday to the rehearsal space to meet his seven-member cast, and with everyone together for the first time, they launched into a table reading.
Then they heard the news.
As New Venture artistic director Greg Williams Jr. recalls, they had just finished the first monologue, “And my stage manager came in and said, ‘Someone’s been shot.’”
This was July 5, the day Alton Sterling was killed by Baton Rouge police officers.
“We all went, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Berry says. “And the piece, it just took on a different weight.”
The play, Hands Up!, was first commissioned in New York as a response to the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, with seven monologues from African-American characters detailing—in often intense language—their run-ins with cops, navigating difficult conversations with white associates, their worries about racial profiling and the ways they tried to appear less intimidating in public.
Berry came to Baton Rouge for two weeks of prep before two performances of Hands Up! at LSU’s Shaver Theatre. In the days that followed the shooting, he and his cast rehearsed in a studio space downtown while residents demonstrated and protested in the streets around them. They rehearsed into the evening hours while below them on the first floor of the Arts Council building, locals gathered to express their own difficult emotions through a poetry open mic night.
“I cannot even begin to say what that felt like,” says Williams, who also acted in the play. “It was such a sense of responsibility because these words meant so much more now than they did two weeks ago. It was unsettling and incredibly eerie. I always think things happen for a reason, but I never had one as strong as this moment.”
That first day of rehearsal, the cast discussed whether or not to go forward with the production.
“We wanted to make sure we were doing everything tastefully, of course, and not opportunistically,” Berry says. “You are speaking and advocating for a community that’s hurting, and you are advocating for a situation larger than yourself. This could be a way to begin the healing process.”
Williams remembers the intense conversations that followed. “Dorrian [Wilson, one of the actors] said it best. She said, ‘Guys, you have to understand that we are putting ourselves on the line by saying this stuff now. Are we all willing to do that?’ And we all had to sit down and agree this has to be said and not be afraid to say it.”
For his part as director, Berry says he resisted the urge to change wording in the script or make overt references to Sterling.
But as the days leading to a production tend to find actors and crew rehearsing furiously, shut off from the outside world, the New Venture team decided to step out instead. So they marched with the youth-led demonstrations held in front of the state capitol July 10.
“We wanted literally to stand with the community that we say we’re doing this work for,” Berry says.
Hands Up! was staged in two productions on Saturday, July 16, at Shaver Theatre. Baton Rouge was still processing Sterling’s death and the peaceful demonstrations and violent clashes with police that followed. The audience couldn’t have known then that the city would be reeling again from the shooting deaths of three police officers the morning after the performances.
Still, the first performance that Saturday brought a diverse crowd that seemed thankful for the moments of humor in the play as much as the moments of reflection.
During the final monologue, the last performer asked everyone in the audience to put both hands up and hold them up as long as they could.
The actor, Romeraux Allen, then launched into a more than 10-minute monologue that was a culmination of the fear, anxiety, helplessness and pent-up anger the six other characters delivered before him.
Those characters described the ways they held back in daily interactions, the ways they held their tongues, the ways they checked themselves to diffuse a situation.
And there, with the rest of the cast around him on stage, each with their hands up as well, Allen’s character’s monologue was basically a “[expletive] you” (his own bracing words) to anyone who tries to tell him how to feel, how to react, how to respond to racial profiling.
“There’s no fourth wall,” Allen says between performances. “You’re talking directly to the people. It’s bringing everything you’ve heard previously before that monologue together, and it’s uncensored, giving it straight to the people. In my monologue, I say what a lot of people wish they could go on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and say directly into the camera about what’s going on.”
It was a moment of release in all its fed up, unapologetic, unpretty anger. And the audience at the Shaver Theatre was feeling it. Even if they were also feeling the physical strain of keeping their hands in the air, they felt the words more. And they responded with vocal affirmation and shouts of support the same as you’d find at a rally on the streets of Baton Rouge.
While these were all characters on stage, their stories were uncomfortably real for the local actors and the local audience now.
Allen says he felt the weight and responsibility in giving that final monologue.
“This play has just gotten way deeper for me, for everybody else, for the city, for the community,” he says. “It’s no longer just a play, it’s no longer just about what happened in Ferguson … this is right here in our backyard.”
newventuretheatre.org
This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of 225 Magazine.
