The Gospel According to James and Other Plays

Introduction

ix Introduction The Gospel According to James is based on a double lynching that happened on August 8, 1930, in Marion, Indiana. The title character of the play,James Cameron,is based on the real-life James Cameron who, at the age of sixteen,narrowly escaped the lynching that took the lives of his two friends,Abram Smith andTommy Shipp. James Cameron died in 2006 at the age of ninety-two after devoting his life to various causes focusing on civil rights and calling attention to the scourge of lynching in America. Although Mr. Cameron was the founder of multiple chapters of the NAACP as well as founder of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee,Wisconsin, he will primarily be remembered as the only man known to have survived a lynching in America. Janet Allen, artistic director of the Indiana Repertory Theatre, commissionedThe Gospel According to James in 2005 after we received a Joyce Award for the research and development of a play based on the 1930 Marion lynchings. After receiving the commission, I spent two years researching James Cameron, his story, and the events surrounding the lynchings before deciding what I wanted the play to be about. From the beginning of my research, I realized that not everyone believed James Cameron’s version of the events of August 8, 1930, and for good reason. Parts of his story had huge holes and other parts were simply implausible. As I continued to research James Cameron’s story, its veracity, for me, became almost irrelevant. I realized that the facts were far less important than the truth, and the truth that buttressed James Cameron’s version of the events that night is vital, relevant, and undeniable . While some parts of his story may not stand up to close inspection, I understood that he told his story the way he remembered it. He told it the way he needed to tell it,and that was his right because it was his story, his truth,his gospel,and that’s what the play,The GospelAccording to James, became. It is a play about individual memory and vision, a play about an individual interpretation of events. However, it isn’t James Cameron’s x I n t r o d u c t i o n memory, vision, or interpretation of events that drives the play. The Gospel According to James is my vision, my interpretation of James Cameron’s interpretation, and while there is a character in the play named James Cameron,that character is not,and does not pretend to be,the man who once walked this earth.Theater must do more than simply try to realistically recreate or represent people and events on stage. Theater must be transformative in nature. It must at least attempt to articulate things that cannot be articulated in any other way. Some scholars and critics have characterized four of the five plays in this collection as historical plays. Such genre-based definitions are often useful for a general understanding of the work. However, for a more comprehensive understanding, that characterization could prove counterproductive because it suggests that the engine, the soul, the raison d’être of these plays resides in the historical events on which the plays are based, when in reality,the historical events on which the plays in this collection are based are merely the devices, the vehicles in which we ride to arrive at a different, more contemporary destination. Jelly Belly is the only play in this collection that has not been characterized as a historical play. However, it is the only play in this collection with a plot that closely follows actual events. Three of the four other plays represented here,Knock Me a Kiss, Free Man of Color, and The Gospel According to James, were each based on a few salient facts that had captured my imagination. Beginning with those facts, I researched the time period of each story, and that research informed, but did not generate, my imagining of what could have happened. My imagining was based on a very subjective, personal, and individual point of view without even a perfunctory nod towards objectivity. All of the themes, 90 percent of the characters,and perhaps 70 percent of the plot of these plays was the result of that imagining. Jelly Belly, on the other hand, is the only play in this collection whose plot, characters, story, and theme were largely based on an actual event that I experienced firsthand...