The danger for those gathered at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School doesn’t merely exist outside the classroom’s walls.
This unique institution, which offers labor and civil rights leadership training, has its own risk. It’s one thing to sit across from an enemy, but in 1955, when Jim Crow was the law of the South, telling that person why they are the enemy just might be a death wish.
In San Jose Stage Company’s timely production of “People Where They Are,” penned with coruscating insight by Bay Area playwright Anthony Clarvoe, physical proximity is loaded with explosive peril. Each of the “students,” who are actually experts in the art of racism and marginalization, bring very specific necessities to the room, a safe, yet illegal space where expertise revealed through role-playing offers incendiary truths for the group to ponder.
While there are many honest interactions between those who gather, refined beautifully by director Benny Sato Ambush, the play’s penchant for sometimes moving into cliche undercuts its ability to offer a revealed universe organically. Genuineness is compromised for rapidity at moments; some of the narratives’ most critical nadirs are not always allowed to flourish fully.
The play begins with a gathering of skeptical seekers reluctant to engage in this powder keg of a room. They include Ned (Michael Champlin), a man insistent he can’t be racist while stating otherwise constantly. There’s also his polar opposite John (Terrance Austin Smith), a Morehouse-educated Black man whose voice and hopes are similar to a young Martin Luther King Jr., down to the shared alma mater. One who expresses her own passion is May (Rebecca Pingree), a white Kentuckian for whom organizing is everything.
The compelling Emma (Estrella Esparza-Johnson) expresses some of Clarvoe’s most poignant ideas in two languages. Rounding out the group is the good-trouble advocate Mrs. Clark (Cathleen Riddley) and her assistant, the guitar-strumming idealist Mr. Carawan (Brady Morales-Woolery), an actual person whose influential folk music and protest songs crossed multiple generations.
These six move each other through every critical juncture of the story, often led by Riddley’s sharp instincts, imbuing her character with purposeful and necessary strokes to challenge all who bear witness to her tactics. Morales-Woolery is seamless in how he incorporates literal and figurative harmony within Mr. Carawan’s life, playing sincere highs and lows effectively. Together, both characters make clear the obsession social justice requires; they can only do so much to protect these inquisitive lives from the whims of those who feel threatened and seek a violent end.
The contrasts between the four determined to square off into a flesh-ripping challenge are quite striking, often becoming the piece’s heartbeat. Pingree’s dialect work and discoveries as a woman coming into her own in multiple ways unifies inside a sweetness built from an edge. Esparza-Johnson’s strength is commanding the space she occupies. Her portrayal of a Mexican American woman removed from her beloved homeland for stepping out of line carries mighty weight. It also lends to the scintillating chasm that exists between Emma and John, whose debate at times falls into “who’s people have suffered the most” territory, making the fact that both peoples have suffered into a secondary point.
Maybe the most interesting turn lives with Champlin’s disturbing and hauntingly effective interpretation of Ned, the epitome of everything white supremacy yearns to protect. He reminds incessantly and falsely that this country was built from his ancestor’s blood, and to heck with those who aren’t buying it. “Whoever had it before, wherever everybody was before, it belongs to my people now” he states with disgusting certainty.
These vicious, brutal attitudes, along with the most passionate and visceral expressions from Smith’s stunning monologue built from years of oppression, contrasts with specific moments which come off as untrue. There is inspiration in a song, and the tunes built with hope are handled beautifully within this staging. However, based on the harm we witness, dancing feels ideal yet premature, inside a narrative that loses steam within the nearly 2½-hour run time.
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Despite the play’s flaws, Clarvoe’s many searing observations lead to plenty of critical and necessary truths, with the hope that those first to cause and acknowledge harm be the first to implement necessary healing.
After all, as Emma expresses when it comes to the translation of one particular Spanish folk song, “it’s about loving all the colors.”
David John Chávez is chair of the American Theatre Critics Association and a two-time juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (‘22-‘23); @davidjchavez
‘PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE’
By Anthony Clarvoe, presented by San Jose Stage Company
Through: Feb. 25
Where: San Jose Stage, 490 S.1st St., San Jose
Tickets: $34-$74; www.thestage.org
