By Christopher Blank
July 1, 2005
In "A Question of Color," closing this weekend at TheatreWorks [in Memphis, TN], playwright Michael Bettencourt returns to Memphis with another critique of America's checkered past in the area of moral values and civil rights. His first play for Playwrights' Forum was the biographical "Dancing at the Revolution" in 2001, which depicted left-wing agitator Emma Goldman on the run from a government witch hunt for suggesting "revolutionary" support for workers' rights and access to birth control.
It's hard to imagine now that Americans once didn't have those rights.
Similarly, "A Question of Color" confronts another senseless restriction, this time on marriage between white and black people.
Bettencourt sets the scene in North Carolina, where an 1873 law prohibited marriages between white people and "persons of Negro or Indian descent to third generation."
(The final miscegenation law in the state, passed in 1953, made the jail time for this felony offense four months to 10 years.)
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Shortly into the play, a poor, lonely white man named John Wicks (played with glowing boyishness by Steven Brown) looks across a mountain stream and lays his eyes upon Susan Morgan (Krissi Cain), a scrappy, independent woman with black and Indian blood.
In the play, adapted from a fictionalized memoir by Sara Beattie, the 1907 rural Appalachian setting has advantages and disadvantages for the lovers. In such a vast landscape, John, for instance, can create a new identity for himself, saying he's of Indian descent.
But the woods are also full of evil white people -- all played to their vilest by Kent Mathis -- who are happy to take advantage of the enterprising couple. There is the Confederate kepi-wearing moonshiner with a hyena laugh, the dirty mountain man a lá Deliverance, and the slimy plantation owner Col. Goforth, whose drunken perversities include raping his black neighbors and employees.
Still, the married couple manage a living for themselves with the help of the earth-mother type Aunt Becky, played with fine dramatic range by Pamela Jones. Director Tony Horne takes a lyrical approach to the play, using movement, choreography and music to create a sense of culture and surroundings.
But in the end, "A Question of Color" doesn't put the ethical issues of miscegenation into a perspective that might speak to a generation still encountering vestiges of that past discrimination and the birth of a new form. Until 2000, the religious Bob Jones University banned interracial dating. And legislators in many states, including this one, oppose marriage rights for gays and lesbians.
The law itself, and not the shallow moral argument behind it, poses the real threat to Bettencourt's couple. It sits in the background throughout the play until it becomes leverage for a dying Col. Goforth. The play becomes not so much a question of color, as a question of the lengths reprehensible people will go to get what they want.