Is Alabama Story just another play about racism? Hardly. History is basically story-telling – and then, as a retired history teacher said to me recently, “connecting the dots to see the bigger picture”. The closer the story is, whether it’s in terms of time or geography or sociology, the more relevant it is. Surely it’s harder to draw lessons from King Tut or adventurers at the South Pole than from something nearer.
The story here, based on actual events, is within living memory – and within 600 miles from us. In 1959, an Alabama legislator became incensed because a children’s picture book was about a wedding between two rabbits, one of which had white fur and the other black. He and the White Citizens Council wanted the book removed from the state library system, even burned. The state librarian, Emily Wheelock Reed, understood this was censorship and resisted. One wonders what, say, a teenager today, would think about the situation, as farfetched as it seems, at least to most of us, today.
Kenneth Jones’ play began when he read, we suspect an obituary, about Emily Reed in the New York Times in 2000. He fictionalizes the legislator as Senator Higgins, and sets up the author of the book, the noted artist Garth Williams as the narrator of the story. (Those illustrations in the Little House on the Prairie? Those, and many more beyond that, were Garth Williams’.)
Emily Reed is played by Jeanne Paulsen. While the word “librarian” evokes stereotypes, Paulsen is indeed spot on in her speech and action. So perfectly does she evoke plenty of librarians I knew in that time frame that seeing her reach for a cigarette was slightly shocking. It’s a bang-up job. Her nemesis, the senator, is Carl Palmer, thumbs behind his lapels and preening his superiority as a native-born Alabamian white male, a combination of a snake and Foghorn Leghorn. To be sure, at this distance in time he can’t help being a caricature, but Palmer doesn’t overplay it.
Larry Paulsen is a charming Garth Williams as well as various other characters in the show. Reed’s second banana – surely she would have objected to that phrase – at the library, Thomas Franklin, comes to us courtesy of Carl Howell, and he’s very serious but a sweetie, just the sort of earnest young man you’d find patrolling the stacks.
There’s a secondary story line about two people who grew up in Demopolis, Alabama. (Serendipitously, that’s the town from whence came Lillian Hellman’s family seen in The Little Foxes and Regina, the latter an opera that OTSL did on this very stage less than a year ago.) Child hood friends, the white woman and African-American man meet near the library after many years. The resultant stiffness and attempts at resolution punctuate things. Both Anna O’Donoghue and Corey Allen show the results of being in the adult world of 1959, both verbally and in their body language. It’s an interesting idea but feels totally detached from the main thread, despite being in the same place and time frame. In addition, it’s rather unrealistic.
Paul Mason Barnes puts together a rewarding experience overall, strong and moving and reminding us about the necessity of the free flow of information. William Bloodgood’s excellent set is neutral only in color, emphasizing the majesty of words.
The extra story line feels superfluous, but the strength of the basic conflict is beautifully delineated. It’s a fine reminder of the fact that Second Amendment rights, by extension, flow right into what we have a right to read.
Alabama Story
through January 27
Repertory Theatre St. Louis
Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts
130 Edgar Rd., Webster Groves