News & Reviews

Speak Truth to Power

Speak Truth to Power
Human-rights festival highlights Fort Lewis' autumn
October 12, 2007
By Patricia Miller, Arts and Entertainment Editor
Durango Herald

Fort Lewis College is staging more than a week of arts events centered around human rights this month.

It all started with the routine trolling for material, said the play’s director Felicia Meyer on Wednesday at the Herald offices. Meyer, who is in her second year of teaching Acting for Camera at the college, remembered Kerry Kennedy’s book of interviews with 50 human-rights activists along with beautiful portraits of them by Eddie Adams. She also knew that the book had been adapted for the stage by Ariel Dorfman as “Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the Dark.”

Some of the activists it treats are famous; others are anonymous.
“The play is ideal for college-age kids because it contains real stories of exceptional human beings,” she said. “It gives them something to sink their teeth into, not only as performance but as thinking, feeling human beings.” Meyer brought the play to the theater department who chose it, but the faculty wanted to do more. They felt the work could raise the consciousness of students and the rest of us. Department chairwoman Kathryn Moller took the play to faculty in other departments who received it enthusiastically, helping to fund the festival.
And two teachers in the sociology department are using the play and book in their courses. Janine Fitzgerald is inviting the play’s 11 actors to her class to perform and discuss the play with her students.

Each performer will play four to six defenders in the ensemble work, Meyer said. Each has researched his or her characters, the context in which they acted and the work they’ve done. Two acclaimed activists, Harry Wu and Marina Pisklakova-Parker will visit the campus to lecture. Both also appear as characters in the play.

Meyer said her actors and crew are stimulated by the opportunity to meet the pair. As for the play, Meyer knows of staged readings, but she doesn’t know if her cast and crew will be the first to stage it as a full-blown play.

Theatrically, the performers will literally emerge from the shadow world to bring their story to the outside world. When not playing a defender, the actors will join the chorus that represents hope. They will work to the African hand drumming composed by Cliff Harris, a feature that Meyer called “a landscape of music.”

Besides the real characters, mythical ones will enact the powers that be, the activists’ opponents. They will articulate the defenders’ greatest fear, that nobody cares.

Good for FLC and their imaginative efforts to put at least a chink in that fear.