Drama exposes Norfolk's dark history

"Line in the Sand" is a play that takes place in Norfolk amid social upheaval and inherent moral crisis.

Written by Chris Hanna, the artistic director of the producing Virginia Stage Company, it is, according to his program notes, "an imagined drama based on historical events." Most notably, and with relief, it is a play - not a documentary, not a bitter social tirade, not a whining wallow in the past, not a sermon.

It narrowly avoids all these pitfalls by playing the events before and during Norfolk's infamous school closings of 1958-59 as if they were suspenseful twists in an ever-expanding thriller. The controversy long forecast for this play is largely missing. Hanna's script plays it meticulously safe.

The line in the sand on the national issue of school integration was drawn here in Norfolk. Everyone from Life magazine to CBS' Edward R. Murrow covered the drama here and, yes, it remains alarmingly dramatic even now, 50 years later.

When you have events as bizarre and threatening as the 1958 Massive Resistance, in which Norfolk closed its schools rather than obey the Supreme Court ruling for racial integration, it's best to let the facts carry the drama.

Hanna has a masterful villain in Mayor William F. Duckworth, who led the battle for segregation to the point of closing six white schools Sept. 29, 1958.

The 151 black students who had applied to attend white schools were rejected, but Judge Walter E. Hoffman, pictured here as a force of common sense, orders that 17 be reconsidered. The play shows them being prepared for the reopening by having fellow blacks heap on insult and isolation.

Duckworth plans "urban renewal" with bulldozers to redistrict areas so that "integration," if it comes, would still mean separate schools. He threatens to close black schools also as the push and shove of policy emerges.

Act I closes with a chain barring the doors of Maury High School and a chain-link fence descending across the stage. The play ends when the school is reopened.

Running 2-1/2 hours, Hanna's play is absorbing in a way that is impossible to evaluate without considering the theater and the city in which it plays. Will it play in New York or California? Does it have an audience beyond its home base?

Yes, with editing and more personal, humanizing, touches, it could. At the present, it is playing before an audience that perhaps brings more personal emotion than the play itself encompasses.

A man in the lobby during intermission points out that "Mayor Duckworth was no fool, as suggested here, but the facts are essentially true." A woman says that her mother often walked with Duckworth on his evening strolls, but didn't on March 4, 1972, the night he was gunned down (a much-later event that is eliminated from the play).

Their comments show how, in Norfolk, even the younger generation can bring something to the troubled table that displays this dramatic banquet. It happened here. The lengthy round of seminars, dinners, musical performances and general hoopla about the 50th anniversary of the event has been extensive, but with no more honestly groping effort than this stage examination.

Hanna's fictional characters don't fare as well as his historical ones. A Norfolk socialite seems to change overnight from a rather empty-headed dilettante to a rights crusader. Two teenage girls are too-obviously opposite in their viewpoints on the new school year.

Act II bogs down when the eventual opening of the schools becomes inevitable with consistent wins for the forces against Massive Resistance. True, but not dramatically suspenseful. Particularly repetitive is a scene in which the black parents of a young man ponder the obstacles that will face their son when school reopens. The same material had been pondered in an earlier scene.

Yet again, Hanna has chosen to depend on episodes rather than tackle a unified play that would put the "facts" in the background. One feared the worst when word leaked out that "hundreds" of people who lived through the era had been interviewed during the two-year preparation for this new play.

Silently, one might hope that one interview and one drama might tell a personal story of the era rather than the story. "Line" is an episodic overview, but it works because the episodes themselves are so telling about a society in the throes of change.

The cast is fine, led by a feisty performance by Tracy Griswold as Duckworth, written perilously close to all those fat sheriffs that are tired cliches of Southern lore, but sometimes, and likely in this case, ringing with truth. We can only cringe when he chides a Navy admiral because "Norfolk was made into a Northern city with grits when the Navy integrated."

Caroline Clay has all the starch and dignity required for Vivian Carter Mason, the tough black leader who tutored the "17" in the basement of Norfolk's First Baptist Church during the closing. The part smells of an overly qualified, overly strong cliche of strength until, in Act II, we get a humanizing moment that the actress grabs with relish. The character, though, brings the play to an unfortunate stop in an Act II address to the City Council that reveals no new material; it should be cut.

As Judge Hoffman, Stephen Bradbury manages the difficult - making a folksy and down-to-earth man also wise and dignified. Dean Nolen brings the proper aggressive assurance to William Prieur's City Hall manipulations.

Director Timothy Douglas, who has worked with the plays of August Wilson, manages to unite the cast of 15 into a smooth team that has no jarring distractions from the overall relentless pursuit of the facts. The set, designed by A. Nelson Ruger IV, is a wonderfully inventive statuary of mass school desks from floor to ceiling - in varied contortions that mirror the off-centered world that houses them.

The play ends with the reopening of the schools, as the chain-link fence that hovers over Act II finally disappears. This seems the logical place to end it. None of the brave and heroic "Norfolk 17" is identified by name or action because the playwright's choice, a quite understandable one, was to emphasize the collective experiences of the group. Their place in history is assured.

There will be debates, perhaps heated ones, about emphasis and choice, but, if anything, "Line in the Sand" has been cautious rather than reckless - perhaps too cautious in an extended plea for "the community" to get involved. Composite characters and time condensations are necessary parts of dramatic interpretation, but good plays are seldom written by committee.

This is the kind of premiere that puts a theater company on the map as a force of creativity, not just re-creation. Hanna is to be congratulated for the daring choice, but we still want that more "personal" play we know he will someday write.

More reportage than dramatization, "Line in the Sand" uses an entire era of both shame and pride to provide an intriguing evening. It's not powerful, but it demands a kind of individual soul searching one rarely encounters in theater.

It brings in one evening a flush of recognition and perhaps even a flush of embarrassment to our psyche. But with it, too, is pride. Knowing where we have been is not a case of shame but a step in getting where we are going.

Mal Vincent, (757) 437-0029, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com