There’s a lot of challenges with trying to make a play about something like the massacre of Black Wall St. of 1921. The scale of events alone is something a playwright has to contend with, the massacre claiming the lives of hundreds of people and destroying an entire community, on top of creating clear emotional and narrative arcs from historical events that would never follow a three act structure. But it’s a story of such importance that it cannot be overlooked; the events in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma would become the largest and deadliest racially motivated massacre in US history, and to this day it is rarely talked about or taught about in history classes. So attempts are made to tell the story. To honor the people who lost their lives at the end of May, start of June 1921.

Playwright Anne L. Thompson-Scretching takes a powerful and creative approach in Resurrection, now playing at the American Theatre of Actors – have some of the dead come back and tell their stories directly to the audience, the “people in the dark”. It allows for powerful monologues from a strong ensemble of actors that tell individual stories out of the destruction of an entire town, from Ron Taylor whose trial was the even that pushed the Klan into attacking Greenwood to Lula Noble whose false allegations of rape lead to Taylor’s arrest and subsequent lynching in the first place, with other residents and perpetrators in between.

The advantage to this approach I already touched on – it’s extremely humanizing and intimate, and it gives each actor a chance to take possession of the stage. The first act starts off in a whirl of chaotic and panicked energy, and moves into deeply moving and effecting stories of horrible violence against black people who simply happened to live in a more prosperous community than their poor white neighbors. It’s hard to hear, and the storytelling in the language itself is incredible. But by the time it gets to Act 2 an hour and a half or so into the play, the drawback starts becoming clearer. This structure is set up to give two and a half hours of maximum emotional intensity. Not only is this draining for both performers and audience alike, it means the energy and intensity on stage tends to stay at a fairly consistent level across the entire runtime. This drains the second act of a lot of emotional punch. We spent so much time hearing about a man falsely accused of rape being horrifically murdered by a lynching mob, a woman trapped inside her shop with her baby as the Klan burns it to the ground, and other horrible atrocities, all delivered at full with nothing held back by the performers so there’d be room for things to escalate. And how could there be? These are horrible deaths for people who did nothing to deserve them, in what way could any performer be justified trying to show any restraint when any person recounting such an injustice or such indignity being inflicted on them would feel pain or anger the likes of which must exceed what most people in the audience could even imagine. It still leaves a structural problem that after intermission the audience has used up a lot of emotional energy, and that there’s very little room for peaks and valleys in the rhythm of the script. It also leaves little room for a climax later in the script. No matter how well the stories are told, two and a half hours of large performances telling hard stories is a lot.

The production itself is passionate. The cast, primarily lead by Courtney Everrett who plays local doctor Alan Jackson and acts as a Narrator and continual spectator to everyone’s stories, are compelling. Kevin Leroy’s energy and bluntness as Peter Holmes, Daniel Kornegay’s anger as Marcus, and Sabyne Santiago’s fear and anxiety as Bess all stood out, and Santiago’s monologue where Bess tells about her final moments was particularly affecting. Possibly one of the most intriguing performances is Moses Sesay as Ron Taylor. He enters with frantic desperation looking for anyone to be able to help him, and his pain as Ron tells about his brutal death and his confusion about why this is happening to him when he didn’t do anything wrong cuts sharply.

Technically, there were a few things that didn’t quite fall into place – No sound designer is mentioned, but it seemed all sound was coming only from one side of the audience which in a couple of moments hurt but was overall negligible, and there were a few transitions in black that either felt slightly abrupt or lasted longer than I could see a need for. But overall these were minor things. The projections by Jake Minter were helpful in showing location but most importantly allowed the audience to see actual photographs from Greenwood, the lights by Jake Smith did well following the flow of the scenes and setting tone, and the suggestive set broken into different areas worked well to clearly define playing spaces for different scenes. It’s interesting that no director is credited in the program, and I suspect many of the directorial duties fell to Thompson-Scretching.

Overall, Resurrection is powerful and moving, and it’s a competent production of an important story. It just would benefit from a few revisions to help give it shape that moves and breathes instead of marching relentlessly to help place its punches most effectively.