Acting Citizen: Which Story Will Be Told?

By James Knudsen

Sixteen years ago we were in a place similar to the one we’re in today. It was an election year. An incumbent president was seeking a second term and I was pondering which story should be told.
    The story I was tasked with telling, in a production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Assassins, was that of John Wilkes Booth. There is the story we all learned in school, “…on April 14, 1865, a deranged actor named John Wilkes Booth….” The event rarely receives the amount of space on the page of the American History textbook that it deserves. That’s understandable; no one wants to be on record as being interested in the murderer of one of America’s greatest Presidents. It wasn’t until I began researching my character that I learned that President Lincoln was one of four targets selected by Booth and his cohorts in their effort to topple the government and in doing so, make possible a better outcome of the Civil War for the Confederate States.
    This was my first character based on an historical figure. And it marked the first time I had pondered the question of which story would be told. There is the story I had learned from my research and there is the story that is expected, the one we have come to know and accept. Theatre being the ephemeral art form, we’ll never know which version made it to the stage. What I can say is that in addition to my realization that a story’s telling can be approached from different perspectives, I realized my responsibility to tell Mr. Booth’s story as accurately as possible.
    In the moment our nation finds itself in today, “who tells the story” is being questioned much as I questioned which story to tell sixteen years ago. America’s black community has been telling society, for decades, that the stories…myths surrounding characters like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are not the stories they would like told. And I suspect that the storytellers and writers are not who the black community would pick either. This questioning has been picked up by – what else? – Facebook. In this benjo ditch of ideas, white Americans (in red hats) are “lamenting” the loss of “black” voices.

    It is lamentable that imagery based on 19th century stereotypes has endured until almost the end of the second decade of the 21st century, but the rapid response from corporate giants like B&G Foods and Conagra, purveyors of Cream of Wheat and Mrs. Butterworth, respectively, provides hope. It says to my mind, that this moment of nation-wide protest, now weeks long, is different. It is not, as some would insist, merely instigators taking to the street. It is corporations changing or removing images that have served their bottom-line for decades. It says that there is a depth to this protest that reaches from the street to the board room in the skyscraper.

Copyright © 2020 by James Knudsen