“You know, the stars are a lot like people. Not what they seem, at all. Giant balls of energy reduced in our minds to tiny pinpoints of light. All the same, yet all different. All sitting in one sky.”
On stage, a daughter and her father stand gazing into the audience seeing not the faces of curious spectators staring back, but of stars, millions and millions of stars, all winking from the mysterious Carolina night sky. One star in particular arrests their attention, capturing it and teasing it, becoming their worlds’ center of gravity — the North Star.
Written by Gloria Bond Clunie (TGS ’92), North Star was performed Monday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day by a talented group of both current and recently graduated students in a special staged reading. Told in flashbacks, North Star depicts a period of turmoil and unrest in American history. Prompted by an unsettling incident, Aurelia Taylor, an African-American woman living in a present day northern city, returns to the memory of being an 11-year-old in North Carolina during the early days of the civil rights movement.
“Nigger.”
The play’s first spoken word stands alone, a motif resting boldfaced in the open space, daring the audience to cover their ears and look away. And thus North Star begins. The first act establishes the historical context of a time that seems distant, like the remnants of a shout lost in the echo of the night. Both the older Aurelia and the audience are taken back to when discrimination against African Americans was expressed in the form of segregated libraries and schools, in the utterance of one word. With the civil rights movement kicking into full gear, Aurelia struggles to come to terms with the hatred marring the lives of those she loves, and in the process discovers what it means to be not only an African American, but an American.
“An American story — we are telling an American story,” Clunie said during the Q&A session after the reading. “You know you piece life together, you think of how far people can go…but I think was a story that may belong to a lot of people who lived through that era and are living through other racist conflicts now.”
In the process of watching the characters piece their lives together on stage, the audience becomes privy to the small communal intimacy that relies on one another to both hold on and let go of their forefather’s constraining past. From Willie Joe Poole — Aurelia’s best friend, defiant in the way only scared young boys can be in the face of bigotry — to Manson Taylor, her father and the one who teaches her to find the North Star, these characters breathe life into the play. Furthermore, these are the very people who fill our own lives with meaning.
“I do remember my father when I was very young, and he would point out the North Star like it was something really important, and because I loved him dearly I would go, ‘Yeah, I see it!’ Because he said it was [there], you know it was in the sky — it’s gotta be there,” said Clunie. “But I think the heart star is what he left in me instead of astronomy.”
And that’s arguably the most significant message of the play — to remember and connect with all aspects of history in order to move forward. This is not just a community of individuals whose lives become classifications of racism or discrimination. That is not to say that the racism is not present — simply that a person is more than just the sum of his or her skin color.
“[Staged] reading really invites people to attend to the language,” said Rives Collins, director of North Star and the chair of the theatre department. “I love the notion [that] I’m left with the abiding power of love [and that] it’s the strongest force on the planet, and I’m convinced that in this story and others that’s our hope for the future.”
“When we think about our past and wanting to move past that and I feel that right now, wanting to have freedom from the puppeteer’s strings of my past and my present life, so I just connected with [the play],” said Lakhiyia Hicks (Comm. ‘10), who acted as Hawkins in the play.
This is a truth that transcends the wear and tear of time. At present, we are in a particular moment in American history where it is crucial for us to remember just what happened in the past and to not let hatred consume us, as warned by Reverend Blake as he sang before his death, “Don’t hate this way, Willy. Don’t hate this way.” While North Star is the story of a young African-American woman coming to terms with her heritage, it is also about America coming to terms with its legacy.
“I see the theater as an extension of the story teller’s art,” Collins said. “One of my favorite lines comes from the grandma, which goes, ‘You thought you were teaching history, but you were teaching the future.’ And I love this notion that if you tell the right story, we help each other both deal with the present and prepare one another to face the future together.”
“I will tell [my daughter] to look up. There’s a universe of light within all of us,” the present-day Taylor looks out to the crowd, smiling as both mother and daughter cradle their hands close to their chests.
“There really is a North Star.”