atta girl: Tales from a Life in the Trenches of Show Business by Peggy Pope

Author:Peggy Pope [Pope, Peggy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462040995
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2011-11-15T08:00:00+00:00

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The third play I was in that season was The Long Dream, adapted from a novel about a lynching in the south. Ketti Frings, the adapter, used to come to rehearsals in a mink coat that trailed along the floor behind her. This play also ran for three or four performances.

I was hired to understudy Barbara Loden. In the course of rehearsals, the producer, Cheryl Crawford, asked me to understudy Isabel Cooley as well. While four black college students in North Carolina were sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter waiting to be served, our producer was finding ways to avoid paying another salary. She must have thought she could get away with this because Isabel Cooley, a light-skinned black woman, was playing a character who was passing for white in the play.

The first time I saw Lloyd Richards, our director, he faced the stage, put his hands on the front of it—it was as high as his chest—and in one movement jumped up on it, landing on his feet. It was a simple, quiet, dramatic act that took my breath away. He called us all together on the stage to talk about the play. He spoke with passion of the time he was in the Army during WWII, stationed outside Biloxi, Mississippi. He went into town on his first Saturday night there and was literally kicked all the way back to the bus station by a bunch of white men. They told him that if he ever came back into town, they would kill him. “I was stationed there for two years and never once went back into town,” he said.

Then he astonished me by saying it would be our job to keep that story in mind during rehearsals, and outside of them as well. He didn’t want the blacks making friends with the whites in the cast. I was shocked by this. It was as if I hadn’t heard him right. Naïveté is hard to pierce, I was finding. I was a chrysalis concerned only with myself and being on a stage.

Lloyd was ahead of the times. He was a quiet leader who played not just close to the vest but deep inside his skin. This play was about a lynching; it was not just a melodrama. It was life, real and stark. Twenty-four/seven rehearsals were how he planned to get it onstage.

A week later, he asked me to put on black makeup and fill out a gospel choir scene in the play. The more black makeup I put on, the bluer my eyes appeared. It was apparent to the audience, an usher told me, as in “Wha’chu doin’ up there in that scene, girl?”

When I told Lloyd about my predicament, he said, “Wear a kerchief and turn upstage.” Eventually, he took me out of the scene. I think it was the producer’s idea. Lloyd was a patient man and let people make their own discoveries.

I don’t know how the black actors felt about my taking a job that should have gone to one of them.

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