May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970; A Play

Afterword

61 a f t e rwo r d Judith Royer and Doris Baizley May 4th Voices is full of surprising discoveries. The wife of a dying man prays for a wounded Kent State student just brought into the same intensive care unit as her husband . . . a high school teacher steps in front of a young antiwar student being pelted with little pebbles from a crowd of enraged bigger kids . . . a man speaks, for the first time, about having thrown a rock at a national Guardsman that fateful day and how he believes it was part of what began his ten years of drinking. These remembered moments are so vivid, so layered with meaning, metaphor, action and revelation—it is hard to imagine any playwright could invent a more powerful dramatization of the events that occurred before, during, and continued long after the Kent State shootings than we have in these personal verbatim accounts. Whatever we thought we knew about Kent State from the news or history books, there will be something in this play that will be a discovery for everyone. Whether it’s called “verbatim theatre,” “dramatized narrative,” “theatre of testimony,” or just plain “documentary,” May 4th Voices puts on stage the experiences of people whose stories might never be heard, or at best will be filed away in university library archives, and on that stage turns them into art. This experience of speaking our stories takes us back to the very essence of theatre as a shared community event. in recent years, theatre artists and audiences have rediscovered this essential theatrical element as demonstrated in the work of Anna Deveare Smith, the late Jo Carson, Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic TheaterProject,andCornerstoneTheatre,tonameonlyafew.WithMay 4th Voices, we welcome a company of vital new contributors to the field. May 4th Voices is especially significant for its home site value. The ongoing Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, begun in 1990 by Sandra Perlman Halem and now housed in the Kent State University Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and Archives, is important for preserving documentation of this historical event from many personal, conflicting, official, and unofficial points of view. now, with 62 David Hassler’s play and Katherine burke’s collaborative direction, these accounts can be presented in performance on-site, in the university and city where the events occurred, and where audiences may include original participants, their families, and a next generation of Kent citizens, providing for all the opportunity for better understanding of a common past. However, this play also extends beyond local significance. As FEMALE STUDEnT 3 says (in Scene 9, “Vigil”): “Kent State was not just Kent State. it was a symbol for everything. . . . as they’ve said, that was the day the war came home.” For those of us who remember the Vietnam War, every voice in this play resonates with our own experiences and takes us back to reflect on and reexamine that time. Of even more importance, however, these voices bring the conflict alive in a present-tense, dramatic immediacy. The national crisis of 1970 is suddenly live and in front of us as a parallel to our present-day crises and conflicts. it is even possible that performing the play will help answer ALUMnUS1’squestionforsomeofus:“Thesekidsarethefuture.They represent life. i wonder, what, if anything, May 4th means to them?” For artists/educators, the play offers yet another benefit. it is a well thought through and skillfully executed model for developing crossdisciplinary “culture studies” teaching projects. For those who work in universities, it provides an excellent example of how to develop a learning experience that can connect theatre departments with many otherdisciplines.Withtheeconomicpressureonmostprofessionaland academic theatres, this kind of play-making presents a creative outlet for writers and actors, fills a need for communities who want their stories told, and builds a future audience of truly engaged theatergoers. On a personal note, for the two authors of this Afterword who remember well the Kent State shootings, the last scene, “Vigil: Legacy of Trauma,” provided them with a new, very moving and insightful discovery about the events. it revealed a PTSD-type of response suffered by so many of the participants, which has been largely ignored in most studies about May 4th and which is given voice so personally and powerfully in this play. As the narrator tells us in the final speech of the play, May 4th Voices offers “not a consolation, but an understanding.” [18.118.227.69] Project MUSE (2024-04...