A SUPPLEMENTARY STUDY GUIDEPrepared by Jacqueline E. Lawtonand Alan Johnson-McNutt

By Tanya BarfieldDirected by Walter Dallas

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Characters and Setting...........................................................Page 2

About the Playwright.............................................................Page 3

Production History.................................................................Page 3

Play Synopsis...........................................................................Page 4

Playwright’s Perspective: Tanya Barfield on Blue Door ..........Page 6

Significance of a “Blue Door”.............................................Page 7

A Brief Timeline.....................................................................Page 8

Selective Glossary of Terms................................................Page 11

Discussion Questions...........................................................Page 15

Design & Production............................................................Page 16

Who’s Who ............................................................................Page 17

1.

By Tanya Barfield Directed by Walter Dallas

on the Arcadia Stage January 14 - March 21, 2010

CHARACTERS

Lewis – mid-lifeSimon, Rex, Jesse – young

SETTINGPrimarily Lewis’ bedroom.

There is also an adjacent empty space onstage.

2.

Blue Door

Tanya Barfield’s other plays include: Dent, The Quick, The Houdini Act, 121o West and Of Equal Measure. A graduate of Julliard’s playwriting program, she was a recipient of the 2003 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. She received a 2005 Honorable Mention for the Kesselring Prize for Drama, a 2006 Lark Play Development/ NYSCA grant and she has been twice been a Finalist for the Princess Grace Award. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, Center Theatre Group, South Coast Repertory, Primary Stages and Geva Theatre Center. Tanya was an invited guest to the “Legacy” Tribute Dinner to the Civil Rights Generation on Capitol Hill which was hosted by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT Tanya Barfield

PRODUCTION HISTORY

Blue Door has been performed at South Coast Repertory, Playwrights Horizons, Seattle Repertory, Berkeley Repertory, Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe. The play was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.

3.

PLAY SYNOPSIS

4.

We are introduced to Lewis, an African American man in his late fifties, as he is struggling with insomnia in his bedroom. As the song fades, we hear Lewis’s inner monologue about how his wife, Kimberly, wants a divorce after Lewis refuses her suggestion to attend the Million Man March. The event, however, seems to stand as a symbol of a larger problem: Lewis’s struggle with his own identity.

Another figure, also African American, steps forward as Simon, Lewis’s great-grandfather. As he describes how he met his wife, Katie, we come to realize Simon and Katie are slaves on separate plantations. Simon tells how he would come to Katie every Saturday with a primrose flower until she made up her mind about whether or not she would marry him. When they did marry at last, Simon could only be anxious about the day he ever lost Katie.

The focus shifts back to Lewis as he jumps into an early memo-ry in his marriage when Kimberly asks him to go on a vacation in the country with her. When he rejects the idea, she diagnoses him with tree anxiety. Lewis connects the fact that he can’t bring himself to vacation in the country with his immutable blackness. He can suppress neither his phobia nor his color.

Simon changes into Lewis’s dead brother, Rex, who starts questioning the nature and audience of the performance itself. He admonishes Lewis’s contempt for his own blackness, citing a white audience within his head that influences the way he is acting. They struggle over their opposite positions intellectually and socio-economically, but Rex tries to get Lewis to realize that they still come from the same place.

Rex suddenly changes back into Simon as a child who is starting to question his family’s position as slaves. As Lewis tries to ignore him, Simon recounts how he learned to read from his master’s son, Jonathan, who molested him during the tutoring sessions. Simon skips forward to after he had married Katie, when his mother informs him that she was to be sold away at an auction. That night, they painted their door blue to keep the good spirits in and the bad ones out.

Lewis begins to tell a story about a departmental welcoming party with the faculty at the university where he just received a job. He recounts how he feared everybody’s reaction to his blackness, but it had been clear that they were forewarned. He is disturbed by one woman’s fixation on his hands and paranoia and judgment quickly fill his mind. He is then pulled into the conversation for his opinion on behalf of “Afro-Americans.” Rex steps forward to comment on Lewis’s disdainful perception of his race and he briefly reenacts the judgmental interior monologue of the woman at the party. Within the scene of the party, Lewis suggests to his new colleagues that his being there suggests that people might be moving beyond race.

Our ancestral player then steps forward as Simon’s son, Jesse, who boasts of his father’s knowledge of math-ematics. When Simon points out to his master that the rent money he requests doesn’t add up, Jesse pipes in about the Freeman Bureau protecting their rights as voting day approaches. Their master claims that they are all practically family and have no need to involve the Bureau. That night, six “ghosts,” implied members of the KKK, visit the family and threaten their lives if they vote. Simon tells Jesse to paint the door blue as Jesse vows to vote one day, ghosts or not.

Lewis takes the stage again and narrates the story of a dinner with his parents after he wrote his book Mathematical Structures and the Repudiation of Time. Lewis’s father, Charles, is less than pleased with the reviews and is also angered by the way the rest of the faculty had treated him as a butler at the publishing party. Charles tells Lewis he has brought shame upon the family and the two barely speak again.

Jesse steps forward once more to recall the day he came across a church while he was living a depressed, nomadic life. Though the church called forth “all ye down-trodden,” when he sat inside, the preacher came to him and told him “ain’t no niggers allowed.” Jesse convinces the preacher to at least let him stay the night for the fare of a ‘whites only’ sign for the church. Jesse awoke the next morning to the congregation shooing him out of the church, waving the sign he had made. They throw him into the back of a wagon, which dumps him off in front of a courthouse that sentences him to a chain gang.

The focus shifts to Lewis, who is in the middle of a math lesson at the university. When he scolds a student for being late and who is unable to answer a question, he is met with the rebuttal of being called “house nigger.” Lewis explodes and calls his student by the same slur. Later, Lewis is called to the dean’s office. The dean has been told that the student had said “Heidegger,” and is compelled to put Lewis on a mandatory sabbatical. Lewis never tells his wife about the sabbatical and it is during this time that Kimberly suggests he march on Washington. He doesn’t go and his wife leaves.

Jesse is singing on the chain gang before he explains how half the men on the gang are in for raping white women when most of them were simply walking on the same side of the street as a white woman at the worst. He tells how once he was freed from his prison yard he marries Selma and has a son, Charles. Jesse recommits to his vow to vote when the day comes. Jesse begins to tell the story of voting day, but Lewis doesn’t allow him to finish. Jesse turns into Rex who tells some of the back-story on their father, Charles. One night after Charles lost his job as a janitor and had been drinking, he comes home to find out Lewis has received poor grades. Lewis acts as Charles and Rex as Lewis as they recount the fight leading to a violent beating. Charles had yelled at Lewis for bringing shame upon him.

Rex reflects on their father’s behavior, which brings him to the day Jesse went into town to vote. When their grandfather went into town, he was lynched by a mob as people gathered and took pictures. Post-cards of the tragedy were sold in the store where Charles would have to run errands. Rex calls Lewis to free himself. Lewis feels the weight of the night and its stories upon him and calls on his great-grandfather, Simon. Simon appears and tells of the day he heard the slaves had been freed. Lewis admits to Simon he has a lot of fixing to do. The two sing a song in Yoruba as they paint their door blue.

5.

Writing Blue Door was the act of exploring forgotten territory. I began the writing out of frustration over the predominant stereotypes of African-Americans in the entertainment endless depictions of ghetto culture. In reality, the majority of African-Americans happen to be middle-class–yet this is rarely represented on the stage and screen. A one-sided image of Black People in the Hood is being marketed to America (not to mention people around the globe) as one of the only pictures of blacks in this country. In addition, the long legacy of African-American identity is often suppressed by the predominant feeling that being a descendant of a slave is shameful–yet being a misogynistic rap artist idealizing violence. Why? This question swirls around in my head as I look at my own family and personal community and see that we are a bunch of smart people–rarely central characters on the American stage (not to mention TV or the movies). And when we are on TV, it is often as a reactionary puppet regurgitating a conservative political ideology that I personally see as a direct assault on the black community.

So, at first, it was frustration that spurred me to write Blue Door. I thought about the myriad issues facing non-ghetto blacks and I eventually honed in on the complicated problem of success and assimilation. At the same time, I felt myself pulled by the histories of our people. I set about researching slave narratives, West African griots (of which many American slaves were cultural descendants) and African-American folktales. I crafted monologues inspired by the long tradition of storytelling in the American black community, dating back to our West African ancestors. Due to the fact that it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write, it was through storytelling and song that our people’s communal identity and history has been preserved. Not that oral history is uniquely African-American, of course. The Odyssey, The Iliad and the Scandinavian Sagas are only a few famous examples from other cultures. But today, it seems that the oral histories and magical folktales of African-Americans are being forgotten. And this cultural amnesia has not been entirely foisted on us by whites, but by our own shame and internalized racism.

It is my hope that many of the themes explored in Blue Door are one which people of any culture can relate to. After all, we all have ancestors. Every culture has a legacy from which it’s birthed. I think it is part of human nature to be pulled by our ancestors, to feel their watchful spirits, to wish we knew their stories, to both scorn and adore them. In times of crisis (when our own self threatens to fragment), we might wonder if our ancestors could answer the basic question of identity. In this vast and complicated universe: who am I? It is only through memory that the soul of an ancestor is kept alive. If we forget our past, do we in some way forget ourselves?

Blue Door is the play that emerged from these questions. It is a very personal exploration, my own theatrical meditation on “blackness,” identity and ancestral heritage. Or, more simply put, the story of a man in the throes of insomnia. This is his night journey.

Tanya Barfield July 2006

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Playwright’s Perspective: Tanya Barfield on Blue Door

6.

Significance of a “Blue Door”

From an interview with the playwright by Sarah Hart from the Dec 2006 issue of American Theatre:

Where did you come across the image of the blue door?I wrote the book for a children’s musical about a young boy who escapes from slavery and joins the first black regiment in the Union army. That was my first foray into historical plays. I learned a lot about Gullah beliefs from writing that play, but since it’s a children’s play, you can’t put in everything you’d like to. The Gullah were an isolated culture on the Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. There were problems with mosquitoes and other pestilence that the white slave masters didn’t want to expose themselves to. So the isolated slaves were allowed to keep much of their indigenous culture that mainland slaves could not. That culture is still alive today. It’s a link between Africa and America. There’s a belief in Gullah culture that if you paint your door blue, you keep away the evil spirits, which are called haints. I always felt that the haints—which are described like ghosts—were the white slave masters or KKK. Then we started rehearsal. Leigh Silverman, our director at Playwrights Horizons, had visited Israel and had gone to this spiritual city Safed, where kabbalah originated. Many of the doors are painted blue there for a similar reason. When I visited India, in Jodhpur, which they call the blue city, all the doors are painted blue for protective purposes. I’ve heard of another such city in Tunisia. It seems that cultures tend to share certain mythologies.

7.

8.

A Brief Timeline

Time is a strong theme in Blue Door and is even a primary interest in Lewis’ mathematical research. Time is an abstract concept and thus has no right or wrong way to look at it, but as humans, we best understand time linearly; one event leads to another, each a temporal slice in the progression from preceding to sub-sequent events. The structure of the play itself, however, illustrates that time does not always have to be viewed sequentially, especially as it relates to memory. Stories are told out of sequential order, but perhaps in an order that best moves Lewis on his journey. Since our history is written and understood linearly, it might help clarify the action in the story to compare the sequence of events in the play to its mentioned historical events, and other important cultural landmarks in time. Events that happen in Blue Door are, of course, in blue.

1619: The first African slaves arrive in Virginia 1793: Eli Whitney’s invention

of the cotton gin greatly increases demand for slave labor.1844: Simon is born.

8.

1846: Frederick Douglass launches his abolitionist newspaper.1851: Simon learns to

read from Jonathan.

1857: The Dred Scott case holds that Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in states and, furthermore, that slaves are not citizens.

1861: The Confederacy is founded when the deep South secedes, and the Civil War begins.

1863: Simon and Katie marry. President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the Confederate states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

1864: Simon’s mother is sent to auction.

1865: Simon and Katie are freed.Congress establishes the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect the rights of newly emancipated blacks (March). The Civil War ends (April 9). Lincoln is assassinated (April 14) by John Wilkes Booth. The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Tennessee by ex-Confederates (May). Slavery in the United States is effectively ended when 250,000 slaves in Texas finally receive the news that the Civil War ended two months earlier (June 19). Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, prohibiting slavery (Dec. 6).Jesse is born.

1867: A series of Reconstruction acts are passed, carving the former Confederacy into five military dis-tricts and guaranteeing the civil rights of freed slaves.

1868: Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, defining citizenship. Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citi-zens, including those born as slaves. This nullifies the Dred Scott Case (1857), which had ruled that blacks were not citizens.

1870: Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitu-tion is ratified, gives blacks the right to vote; Hiram Revels of Mississippi is elected the country’s first African-American senator.

1871: Jesse witnesses “six ghosts” arriving at the door. 1877: Reconstruction ends in the South. Federal

attempts to provide some basic civil rights for African Americans quickly erode. 1890: Jesse visits the “little church”

and is sent to the prison yard.1896: Plessy v. Ferguson: This landmark Supreme Court decision holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for the repressive Jim Crow laws in the South.

1903: Jesse is released from the chain-gang.

1906: Jesse and Selma marry.1908: Charles is born.

1909: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded in New York by prominent black and white intellectuals and led by W.E.B. Du Bois.

1915: Jesse dies.

1918: Selma leaves and Charles is raised by Simon and Katie

1920: Charles moves with Simon and Katie to Harlem.The Harlem Renaissance flourishes in the 1920s and 1930s. This literary, artistic, and intellectual movement fosters a new black cultural identity.

1931: Nine black youths are indicted in Scottsboro, AL, on charges of having raped two white women. Although the evidence was slim, the southern jury sentenced them to death. The Supreme Court over-turns their convictions twice; each time Alabama retries them, finding them guilty. In a third trial, four of the Scottsboro boys are freed; but five are sen-tenced to long prison terms.

1933: Charles and Beverly marry.1937: Lewis is born.

1940: Rex is born.

1943: Charles starts a janitorial service.1947: Simon dies. Charles loses business. Lewis is badly beaten by Charles.1948: Although African Americans had participated

in every major U.S. war, it was not until after World War II that President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order integrating the U.S. armed forces.

1954: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional (May 17).

1955: A young black boy, Emmett Till, is brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Two white men charged with the crime are acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boast about committing the murder. The public outrage generated by the case helps spur the civil rights movement (Aug.). Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the “colored section” of a bus to a white passenger (Dec.1). In response to her arrest Montgomery’s black community launch a successful year-long bus boycott.

1960: Four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter (Feb. 1). Six months later the “Greensboro Four” are served lunch at the same Woolworth’s counter. The event triggers many similar nonviolent protests throughout the South. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded, providing young blacks with a place in the civil rights movement (April).

1963: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is attended by about 250,000 people, the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation’s capital. Martin Luther King delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The march builds momentum for civil rights legislation (Aug. 28).

10.

1964: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin (July 2).

1967: President Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. He becomes the first black Supreme Court Justice. The Supreme Court rules in Loving v. Vir-ginia that prohibiting interracial marriage is unconstitutional. Sixteen states still have anti- miscegenation laws and are forced to revise them.1968: Lewis meets Kimberly.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, TN. (April 4). President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing (April 11).

1970: Lewis and Kimberly marry.

1972: Lewis’ wife wants to take a vacation in the country. Lewis experiences “tree anxiety.”

1974: Lewis goes to tea party at the university.1978: The Supreme Court case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke upheld the con-stitutionality of affirmative action, but imposed limitations on it to ensure that providing greater opportunities for minorities did not come at the expense of the rights of the majority (June 28).

1987: Rex dies.

1992: The first race riots in decades erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four white police officers for the videotaped beating of African-American Rodney King (April 29). 1994: (September) Lewis’ book receives bad notices. A few

weeks later, he has dinner at his parents’. (November) Charles dies. Lewis doesn’t go to funeral.

1995: (September) Lewis has altercation with student. Lewis is put on sabbatical. (October 16) Million Man March. Lewis’s wife leaves. (November) The night of the play. The anniversary of Charles’s death.

2008: On November 4, Barack Obama becomes the first African American to be elected president of the United States

2009: Eric Holder is the first African American to serve as Attorney General.

Ariettic: A word that Rex has invented, coming from “arietta,” meaning a short aria.

Assimilate: to make similar, to absorb into the culture or mores of a population or group; a process for which many whites appealed during integration , and many blacks decried due to its implied erasure of cul-tural identity

Carpetbaggers: The term southerners gave to northerners who moved to the South during the Recon-struction era. They joined with freed slaves and scalawags (southern republicans) to attempt to control the confederate states.

Causality: A cause and effect relationship. The causality of two events describes to what extent one event is caused by the other. When there is causality, there is a measure of predictability between the two events.

Dimensionality: refers to the parameters or measurement required to define the characteristics of an object—i.e. length, width, and height or size and shape. In mathematics, dimensions are the parameters required to describe the position and relevant characteristics of any object within a conceptual space—where the dimension of a space is the total number of different parameters used for all possible objects considered in the model.

Doppelgänger: comes from German; literally translated, it means “doublegoer.” A dopplegänger is often the ghostly counterpart of a living person. It can also mean a double, alter ego, or even another person who has the same name. A dopplegänger is sometimes viewed as a psychic projection caused by unresolved anxieties.

Eternal verities: The eternally true things: true ideas of the universe, of all Nature, and of ourselves.

Euclidean Universe: There are basically three possible shapes to the Universe; a flat Universe (Euclidean or zero curvature), a spherical Universe (positive curvature) or a hyperbolic Universe (negative curvature). All three geometries are classes of what is called Riemannian geometry, based on three possible states for parallel lines • never meeting (flat or Euclidean – think of the Euclidean plane marked with an x and y axis) • must cross (spherical) • always divergent (hyperbolic)

Existential: Of, relating to, or affirming existence; grounded in existence, or the experience of existence. Rex constantly urges Lewis to “Be in this night.” Lewis’s problems are almost all existential in nature. He doesn’t know where, who, why he is.

Feng Shui: literally wind-water. A Chinese geomantic practice in which a structure or site is chosen or configured so as to harmonize with the spiritual forces that inhabit it

Freeman’s Bureau: was established by Congress on 3rd March, 1865. The bureau was designed to protect the interests of former slaves. This included helping them to find new employment and to improve educational and health facilities. In the year that followed the bureau spent $17,000,000 establishing 4,000

Selective Glossary of Terms

11.

schools, 100 hospitals and providing homes and food for former slaves. It also helped to establish Howard University in Washington in 1867.

Ham: The story of Ham, son of Noah, is related in Genesis 9:20–25, which describes Ham seeing his father drunk, naked and asleep in his tent. He told his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who entered the tent backwards and without looking covered their father with garments. Noah awoke and cursed descendents of Ham to be the servants of the descendents of his brothers.

Contemporary scholars have two theories about Noah’s harsh punishment of Ham. They believe that when Ham “saw” Noah, he most likely either castrated him or sodomized him. It is also interesting to note that the bible calls Egypt the “land of Ham” because Ham was one of Noah’s sons who moved southwest into Africa and parts of the Middle East.

Heidegger: Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, was best known for his book, Being and Time.

Jim Crow Laws: After the American Civil War most states in the South passed anti-African American legislation. These became known as Jim Crow laws. This included laws that discriminated against African Americans with concern to attendance in public schools and the use of facilities such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, cinemas and public baths. Trains and buses were also segregated and in many states marriage between whites and African American people.

Jump over the broom: Jumping the broom is an African American phrase and custom relating to wedding ceremonies. In some African-American communities, marrying couples will end their ceremony by jumping over a broomstick, either together or separately. The practice dates back at least to the 19th century.

Kurt Gödel: Kurt Friedrich Gödel (b. 1906, d. 1978) founded the modern, meta-mathematical era in mathematical logic. His Incompleteness Theorems, among the most significant achievements in logic since, perhaps, those of Aristotle, are among the handful of landmark theorems in twentieth century mathematics. His work touched every field of mathematical logic, if it was not in most cases their original stimulus. In his philosophical work Gödel formulated and defended mathematical Platonism, involving the view that mathematics is a descriptive science, and that the concept of mathematical truth is an objective one.

Malcom and Martin: i.e. Malcom X (African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (American clergyman, activist and prominent leader in the African-American civil rights movement).

Mathematical Structures and the Repudiation of Time: Lewis’s book. It’s interesting to compare the subject of Lewis’s work to his journey in the play. Time in Blue Door has a certain wrapped quality to it—layers upon layers that are connected by both logical and illogical thoughts and ideas. In Math and Science, sometimes the most difficult questions to answer are the easiest ones to ask. Lewis, as a mathematician, applies those same questions to himself. We learn how he came to be, and watch as he struggles to try and answer, “why?”

12.

Million Man March: The Million Man March was a mass gathering held in the United States, in Wash-ington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. Under the leadership of Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, black men from across the United States converged on Washington in an effort to “convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male” and to unite in self-help and self-defense against economic and social ills plaguing the African American community.

Newtonian absolute time and absolute space: All motion occurs in space and is measured by time. In Sir Isaac Newton’s model both space and time are unaffected by the presence or absence of objects. That is space and time are absolute, an arena where the play of Nature unfolds. In Newton’s words, Absolute space in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable....absolute and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration.

Ofay: An American English slang term for a white person, of uncertain origin

Parity: equality

Pattyroller: Patroller, in dialect referring to guards of the plantations

Pi: π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. It is approximately equal to 3.14159265 in the usual decimal notation. π is an irrational number, which means that its value cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction. Consequently, its decimal representation never ends or repeats. It is also a transcendental number, which implies, among other things, that no finite sequence of algebraic operations on integers (powers, roots, sums, etc.) can be equal to its value. Because the decimal places of pi are infinite, it is impossible to count the number backwards, as Lewis notes in the script, an observation first made by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Pickaninny: In the Southern United States, pickaninny was long used to refer to the children of African slaves or (later) of African American citizens.

Quantum Physics: Quantum physics is a branch of science that deals with discrete, indivisible units of energy called quanta as described by the Quantum Theory. There are five main ideas represented in Quantum Theory:

1. Energy is not continuous, but comes in small but discrete units. 2. The elementary particles behave both like particles and like waves. 3. The movement of these particles is inherently random. 4. It is physically impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same

time. The more precisely one is known, the less precise the measurement of the other is. 5. The atomic world is nothing like the world we live in.

This theory contains many clues as to the fundamental nature of the universe—a nature that is much dif-ferent than the world we see. As Niels Bohr said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”

13.

Reconstruction: After the North defeated the South in the Civil War, politicians faced the task of putting the divided country back together. There was great debate about how severely the former Confederate states should be punished for leaving the Union. With the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, it was up to President Andrew Johnson to try to reunite former enemies. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 laid out the process for readmitting Southern states into the Union. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) provided former slaves with national citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) granted black men the right to vote. These were only the first steps, however, toward reconstructing the fragmented nation.

Repudiation: Repudiate: to reject as unauthorized or as having no binding force

Square root of negative one: the imaginary unit. A negative number multiplied by another negative number will always have a positive product. Therefore no negative number can have a real square root. But of course... not being real never stops mathematics. The square root of negative one, also identified as i, connects the world of real numbers with that of complex numbers (numbers that contain both a real and imaginary value).

Temporal reality: time experienced in the present, temporary or transitory.

Sophisms: 1. a false argument (usually a deceit) 2. A paradox

Speakeasies: An establishment that sold illegal alcoholic beverages during the prohibition.

Stress tensor: quantity in physics that describes the density and influx of energy and momentum in space/time.

Uncle Tom: is a pejorative for an African American who is perceived by others as behaving in a subservient manner to White American authority figures, or people whose political views or allegiances are considered by their critics as detrimental to blacks as a group. The term Uncle Tom comes from the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although there is debate over whether the character himself is deserving of the pejorative attributed to him.

Wittgenstein: a philosopher who worked on the foundations of mathematics and on mathematical logic. He was the first to observe that pi could never be recited backwards, as its decimal places are infinite

14.

1) Why do you think Tanya Barfield decided to make Lewis a professor of mathematics? How do you think this might change the way he looks at the world and himself ?

2) What would you say Lewis’s primary struggle is? Does he eventually overcome it or does it overcome him?

3) How are Lewis and his brother Rex different? What do you think their relationship was like?

4) How does your ancestry affect you as a person? Do you often think about the past to in-form you in the present, or do you focus on the present to bring you to the future?

5) Blue Door focuses on African American history. How do you think people from other cul-tures can relate to this story?

6) How would you describe the concept of race? In what ways does an exterior description affect one’s self-view?

7) Oral tradition has played an important role in passing along history and stories. Give one example of a story you’ve heard by ear. How was it different from when you’ve read a story?

8) Lewis seems to try to forget his painful memories, but they constantly haunt him. Do you think confronting one’s painful memories head-on could be healthy and help to prevent this?

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Discussion Questions

Our Production

Scenic DesignerDANIEL CONWAY

Lighting DesignerTHOM WEAVER

Fight DirectorCharles Conwell

Vocal CoachRenee K. Robinson-Way

Costume DesignerALISON ROBERTS

Sound Design & Additional MusicROBERT KAPLOWITZ

Dramaturg JACQUELINE E. LAWTON

Assistant DirectorMALIKA OYETIMEIN

DES

IGN

& P

ROD

UCT

ION

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Blue Door set sketch and m

odel by Scenic D

esigner Dan C

onway

Stage ManagerALEC E. FERRELL

TH

E CA

ST

Who’s WhoJOHNNIE HOBBS, JR. (Lewis) Blue Door marks the debut of Mr. Hobbs at Arden Theatre Company. Celebrating his 27th year in the fall of ‘09, Mr. Hobbs is a tenured associate professor at the Ira Brind School of Theatre Arts at The University of the Arts. In 1996 Mr. Hobbs was the recipient of the Mary Lou Beitzel Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is also the Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Academic Achievement Program and the advisor of the African American Student Union and the African Diaspora Collective. Recent directorial efforts were Cider House Rules Part I as well as Does Your House Have Lions–the poetry of Sonia Sanchez. The Legacy of Love Foundation–Delta Sigma Theta Sorority (Philadelphia Chapter)–recently honored Mr. Hobbs for his contribution in Arts & Culture.

Johnnie Hobbs, Jr. is proud of his thirty plus years affiliation with the nationally recognized Freedom Theatre and attributes much of his success to the training and mentoring he received from Freedom Theatre’s co-founders, the late John E. Allen, Jr. and the retired Robert Leslie.

The three-time Barrymore nominee has played key roles in many of Freedom Theatre’s most critically acclaimed productions. Most notably: Black Nativity, Black Picture Show, Simply Heavenly with Melba Moore and Zooman and the Sign with Virginia Capers (Los Angeles Premier). Mr. Hobbs has enjoyed critical success with the works of August Wilson: Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and King Hedley II. He has traveled to China and Japan through Philadelphia’s Sister City Program. Noteworthy film and television credits include principal roles in Star Stuff, The In-Crowd, Twelve Monkeys, Snipes, Up Close and Personal, The Wire, Rocky Balboa with Sylvester Stalone and most recently, Cover directed by Bill Duke. Mr. Hobbs also distinguished himself in a tour-de-force performance of Paul Robeson by Phillip Hayes Dean directed by Walter Dallas.

KES KHEMNU (Simon/Rex/Jesse) Characters of the Baconion canon include: Puck, Sir Toby, Othello, Hotspur, Macduff, Mercrutio, Oberon, Petruchio, Don Jon, with various Shakespeare companies in Connecticut and elsewhere. Regional theatre from Rhode Island to Atlanta to Boston to New York to etc with the contemporary works, Alien Garden, The Piano Lesson (Barrymore nominee) Lesson Before Dying, Lobby Hero, Highland Mist (writer), The 11th Year, American Buffalo, amongst others. As a director, Ivanov with the Neptune Rep Co in NY, Othello and Macbeth with Forest Rep in CT, and Spiritual Porn (writer) with the Rooster Theatre Co in Manhattan. TV: Law and Orders, etc

DANIEL CONWAY (Scenic Designer) Recent projects include: Dirty Blonde (Signature Theatre), Radio Golf (The Studio Theatre), Twenty-Six Miles (Two River Theatre in conjunction with Roundhouse Theatre), the premiere of Jason Robert Brown’s Trumpet of the Swan (Kennedy Center), Teddy Roosevelt and the Ghostly Mistletoe (Kennedy Center Family Theatre), the premiere of The Giver, (ASOLO Theatre in Saratoga), Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, Arcadia, and MacBeth (Folger Theatre). Mr. Conway has designed five shows for the Arden including: the premiere of Aaron Posner’s My Name Is Asher Lev, The Pavilion, and Crime and Punishment. A ten-time nominee, Mr. Conway received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Set Design in 2000 and in 2009 for the premiere of David Adjmi’s Stunning (Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co).

ALISON ROBERTS (Costume Designer) is in her tenth season as Arden’s Costume Supervisor. She has a BA in Theatre Arts from Rowan University and an MFA in Costume Design and Technol-ogy from Illinois State University. In addition to her staff position, she has designed costumes for numerous Arden productions. This season she designed both The History Boys and Rabbit Hole. You can also see her freelance design work with Theatre Exile and Act II Playhouse this season. Many thanks and love to her Arden family and her 4th St family.

THOM WEAVER (Lighting Designer) Previously for the Arden: My Name Is Asher Lev. Designs in the area include: Wilma Theatre Company – Scorched (Barrymore nom), Coming Home, Becky 17.

Shaw. People’s Light – Snow White in Follywood. Delaware Theatre Company – It’s a Wonderful Life, All the Great Books, The Diary of Anne Frank. Theatre Exile – American Buffalo (Barrymore nom.). Two River Theatre – 26 Miles (also with Roundhouse), ReENTRY, A Year with Frog and Toad, Macbeth (also with the Folger), Bad Dates. Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival – Complete Works, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Other theatre credits include: Cal Shakes, Vital Theater Company, Children’s Theatre Company, CenterStage, Folger Theater, Syracuse Stage, Berkshire Theatre Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Signature Theater Company, Berkshire Opera, Urban Stages, Lincoln Center Institute, Lincoln Center Festival, York Theatre, Summer Play Festival, 37 ARTS, Spoleto Festival USA, City Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, and Yale Rep. He is a member of Wingspace Design Group and a staff member of PlayPENN. Education: Carnegie Mellon and Yale.

ROBERT KAPLOWITZ (Sound Designer) Joins the Arden for his first full Philly production as a new local artist. In NY, he received an OBIE for Sustained Excellence in Sound Design, and critical acclaim for the current Broadway production of Fela! His designs and compositions have been heard at the NYSF/Public Theater, Lincoln Center, NYTW, MTC, Signature, Roundabout, SoHo Rep, PS122, LAByrinth, 2nd Stage, Primary Stages, The Vineyard, MCC, the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Sundance, PlayPENN, and others; as much as he loves his work, he loves Kittson and Niall even more.

CHARLES CONWELL (Fight Choreographer) is a Professor of Theater at the University of the Arts where he has taught stage combat for 23 years. He is a member of the Society of American Fight Directors.

JACQUELINE E. LAWTON (Dramaturg) completed her MFA in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin in May of 2003. Currently, she resides in Washington DC, where she has worked at several theater companies as an actress, dramaturg, playwright and teaching artist. She is thrilled to be working with the Arden, Walter Dallas, and the entire Blue Door cast and production team. She would like to give special thanks to her family and friends.

RENEE K. ROBINSON-WAY (Vocal Coach) has been studying music since the age of 8 and began her vocal studies at the age of 11. She possesses a unique ability to bring the best out in a vocalist and enjoys bringing music to life through others. Renee has worked with many local and world renowned artists and influenced many singers during her 25 years of teaching. She is a performing artist who sings and teaches in almost every genre of music. She has worked on many productions with Walter Dallas and has often been referred to by him as a musical “genius”. After working for the School District of Philadelphia and Freedom Theatre for 13 years, while freelancing, Renee has decided to return to school to pursue her education, aspiring to one day receive her Doctoral Degree in Vocal Music Pedagogy.

TANYA BARFIELD (Playwright) is an African-American playwright and actress whose works have been presented both nationally and internationally with such festivals and companies as the Arena Stage, The Royal Court Theatre, the New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Hartford Stage, The Guthrie Lab, and New York Stage Film. Her plays include: 121° West, Defacing Patriotic Property, Dent, Foul Play, The Houdini Act, Medallion, Of Girl Wolf and Wanting North, Pecan Tan, The Quick, Snapshot, Without Skin or Breathlessness, and The Wolves. She is also the author of the book for a children’s musical entitled Kofi’s Civil War. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School’s Playwriting Program and a recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award. Blue Door was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

WALTER DALLAS (Director) is pleased to return to the Arden where he directed The Piano Lesson and was music director for Gee’s Bend. Blue Door reconnects Walter with two of his favorite actors with whom he has worked on over 20 productions, Johnnie Hobbs, Jr. and Kes Khemnu. Walter has long been a creative force on the American theatre scene: while earning his MFA at the Yale School of Drama, he was a director in the cultural wing of the New Haven Black Panther Party and a resident director at Yale University. He created Atlanta’s Proposition Theatre, Berkeley’s Black Ensemble Theatre, the School of Theatre at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was Associate Artist at the Philadelphia Drama Guild, and was Artistic

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Director of Freedom Theatre where he wrote, produced and directed numerous world premieres including Lazarus, Unstoned, Cooley High, Black Nativity, and Sparkle. He also directed a record-breaking production of Porgy and Bess for the Philadelphia Opera Company. Walter was lead writer for the award-winning documentary, Standing in the Shadows of Motown whose many international accolades include Best Non-Fiction Film of the Year by the National Society of Film Critics and four Grammy Awards. His work has been seen on television, on and off Broadway, at major theatres across America, and has taken him to Africa, the Caribbean, England, France, Russia and South America. Now living in the DC area, he is Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Maryland. Walter’s generous community involvement is global: last year he visited and adopted Hillside, a primary school in Accra, Ghana. In a show of appreciation for his support, Hillside’s new junior high school has been named the Hillside-Walter Dallas Junior High School. He has been invited to become an associate faculty member at the University of Ghana. For his creative work in South Africa, he received The Mover and Shaker Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Promotion of South African Arts and Culture. Founded recently by a young protégé of Walter’s in Accra, the Walter Dallas Children’s Foundation uses creative dramatics to teach young children the value of education, good health, and community service. Also a photographer, Walter often displays his work on Facebook, where it has received positive responses from professional photographers from around the world. In fact, it was on Facebook that Terry Nolen discovered Walter’s photography. The result of that “find” is the Walter Dallas: Blue Door Photography exhibition currently on display in the lobby of the theatre.

MALIKA OYETIMEIN (Assistant Director) is excited to be on the creative team of Blue Door. Ms. Oyetimein is a Director in the Tri-State area and has held occupation as Assistant Director at Delaware Theatre Company (The Piano Lesson), Oregon Shakespeare Festival (A View from the Bridge), and Contemporary Stage Company (The Island, Exits and Entrances). It is truly an honor and pleasure to work with such a wonderful director and talented cast. She would like thank her loved ones for the constant support.

ALEC E. FERRELL (Stage Manager) Past Arden credits include Rabbit Hole, My Name Is Asher Lev, Candide and Go, Dog. Go! Alec has also worked recently with Theatre Horizon, PlayPenn, and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Member AEA, SMA. Many thanks to Cast, Crew and Staff. Love to Amy and the Dibblets.

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