Dexter Singleton and Austin Dean Ashford.
It was just a read-through of a scene, without a costume or stage blocking, but the switches in writer and actor Austin Dean Ashford’s tone of voice were more than enough to convey switches in character: a wistful, optimistic young teacher, and an older, weathered but hopeful mentor. Later on in the reading, a harried school principal, and four students with whom that young teacher was going to have to prove himself. Director Dexter Singleton listened intently, and took notes.
Ashford and Singleton were doing a read-through, getting ready for a run of Ashford’s Black Book, a one-man show through Collective Consciousness Theatre running at Bregamos Community Theatre, 491 Blatchey Ave., May 10 through May 25. Black Book takes the audience to Melvin Tolson High School, where summer school is in session, and a young teacher — and former Great Debater — takes over for another educator and learns that, in this school, teachers have the right to bear arms.
The dialogue among the characters brims with humor, wry asides, verbal sparring. In the first scene, the young teacher, also named Austin, delivers a monologue to his first love: debate. “You sculpted me and molded me into a warrior,” Austin says. “You taught me how to wear a suit and tie a tie.” But most of all, “you taught me to seek the truth.” And though the breakup — caused by Austin’s graduation from college — has been hard, he will always remember to find truth through rhetoric, “to help save Black lives like mine.”
But Austin’s ideals will be tested at Melvin Tolson High School. He’s an inexperienced teacher being put in a classroom with students who aren’t going to make it easy for him. But most pressing, there has been a shooting at the school recently, involving a teacher and a student. And the boys in that class are grieving; they’ve lost a friend.
Singleton and Ashford first connected in the summer of 2018 through TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Ark., when the company’s artistic director Robert Ford paired them for the company’s annual new play festival. “I had never been to Arkansas before, never worked at that theater, and I’d never met him,” Singleton said of Ashford. At the time, Ashford was a student at the University of Arkansas, working toward his MFA in acting and playwrighting. Black Book was his master’s thesis. “He had given this opportunity to work on the play, to build it and develop it,” Singleton said, with the aim of performing it as a solo show.
“He initially only had a few pages,” Singleton said, “dramaturged by his professor, John Walsh,” and “the three of us got working.” Two weeks later, it was a full-length play. Ashford performed it twice for TheatreSquared’s festival. In the fall, as Ashford was graduating, Singleton directed a run of it at the university. Meanwhile, Black Book won several awards through the Kennedy Center’s American College Theater Festival, and Ashford performed it at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. for the festival’s conference. “It did really, really well,” Singleton said.
They knew at the time that their collaboration wasn’t over. “Dexter is the first Black director that I’ve been able to come across who’s been successful, and who’s been able to take the time to mentor me,” Ashford said. “We always had thoughts for years to come back to it eventually,” Singleton said. It was slated to be Collective Consciousness Theatre’s final play for its 2019 – 2020 season, after its run of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew — which was cut short by the pandemic. “We just kept looking for opportunities,” Singleton said.
But in another way, time was on their side. Ashford developed his theater practice as an actor and writer, branching out into music as well, and began pursuing a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Fine Arts from Texas Tech University. “My active listening is better” than it was in 2018, Ashford said. “My characterization is better. I understand how to take notes better. I understand how to connect with an audience better.” Singleton is now senior artistic associate and director of new play development at TheatreSquared. “Both of us, as artists, have gained more experience at art and life,” Singleton said. “The perspectives that we had on the world and art has evolved since then.”
The play’s central questions — about whether teachers should be able to carry guns in schools — have also only grown more pointed since 2018. School shootings have continued and the Black Lives Matter movement drew unprecedented attention to the killing of Black people by authority figures. Just two weeks ago, Tennessee’s state legislature passed a bill to allow teachers to carry handguns on public school grounds. The national debate “has always been there,” Singleton said, but perhaps the Tennessee law will “accelerate things” in “other states looking at the possibility of being able to carry.”
If the play seems timely, however, it may simply be because Ashford was paying attention. “I was trying to anticipate what I felt like was already becoming a reoccurring occurrence,” Ashford said. “How are parents and families going to feel more safe with their children going to school with more shootings?” Ashford went to school in “a lot of Southern states, who have different ideologies about gun laws and what individuals should be able to do.” It was easy to imagine a near future in which teachers carrying firearms would be legal. “What happens to some of the Black and Brown bodies,” he said, “if an accident happens? What does that mean for people trying to respond?”
“The speculation” Ashford engaged in might be “right, but I think the questions that the play offers are still very fresh perspectives that I think we need to find out some answers to now.”
Ashford, in character.
But Ashford and Singleton both take more of a human than a political approach to those questions. Both are acutely aware of how the different gun laws across the U.S. reflect the country’s different regional cultures, as well as the cultural divides between urban and rural people. Singleton has family in Alabama who remind him that “it’s different there” regarding attitudes toward guns; kids learn to shoot as soon as they can hold a gun. “They don’t feel the same way about guns that other people do.”
Black Book also touches on the difficulties of being a teacher — difficulties that have become more acute since the pandemic, as students struggle to catch up in math and literacy, some students remain truant, and teachers leave the profession. “This is paying homage to a lot of teachers who have given a large chunk of their whole lives, and there’s less defense for the teacher in the classroom than there has ever been,” he said. He also worries about students, giving up on school, giving up on themselves.
In another sense, Black Book isn’t entirely a solo show because “the audience has a role,” Ashford said. Changes in the audience, night after night, in how they respond to the questions he asks “always keep it sharp for me,” he said. “Sometimes people have a really comfortable time being passive when things are right in front of them. … I really like the interaction because it reminds people that this is happening” and that they “have to participate or make a decision, whether I want to or not … I’m not saying anything has to have the answer,” but “let me hear you think critically out loud, while we work it out, because a closed mouth is not going to get us anywhere.”
For Ashford, an “honest moment of dialogue” between performers and audience in a play helps explore “the idea of African-American theater play versus Black theater play. A lot of times in African-American theater there is a form of White gaze … how is capitalism still involved? How is your boss involved?” Whereas “in Black theater, it’s how you’re engaged with the audience to have a spiritual experience that doesn’t necessarily focus on that.”
Which brings it all back to the power of rhetoric and debate. “If you give somebody the tools to articulate themselves,” Ashford said, “and then step back and listen on what they think for themselves” — what happens then?
Or, as the students at Melvin Tolson High School put to Austin, in his first day on the job, as he struggles to connect with the class, to set the tone: “Are you scared that public debate won’t save our lives like it did yours?” Or can the right words set the path to a better world?
Collective Consciousness Theatre’s production of Black Book runs at Bregamos Community Theatre, 491 Blatchley Ave., May 10 to May 25. Visit CCT’s website for tickets and more information.