Reflecting on the Process
Posted by Curtis Jackson on 3/25/2010
Playing Chet in A Separate Peace was a fantastic experience. After the show closed earlier this month, I’ve been reflecting on the process. Over the run, I was fascinated by our evolving discussions within the cast and with our audience. I had in-depth discussions with actors Damir Konjicija (a Bosnian refugee), Govind Kumar (of Indian descent), and Jake Cohen (a Jewish American), as well as conversations with our director Jonathan Berry about my African and Japanese bloodline. A recurring question for me was: how did we, or rather the characters we play (Finny, Bobby, Gene and Chet), get to Devon, an elite New England private school, as minorities in 1942?
In investigating this question, I was given the opportunity to go back to high school, not only as an adolescent learning about life, but as an adult re-learning American History. Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were both born into slavery, but eventually made their way into exclusive American educational systems. W.E.B. DuBois received a degree from Fisk University, a historically black college, but was said to have attended a racially integrated elementary school. Closer to our setting, 1943 New England, Edith Jarreau was possibly the only African-American woman to own an upscale hotel in Buffalo, NY during the Depression. Could she have had a son called “Chet” and sent him to a place like Devon? Interestingly enough, our savvy audiences never asked.
War, of course, was another interesting aspect of our production. In the play, the Devon boys are removed from 1943, the draft, the recent bombing of Pearl Harbor. Today, we have our own wars with Afghanistan and Iraq. We have our own expectations to serve our country by going to college or not publicly embarrassing ourselves on Facebook or Twitter. Last week, our audience reminded me of the students for whom I used to perform Letters Home, a production of letters written by actual soldiers currently serving in the U.S. Military or recently killed in combat. As we conducted our talk-back, my mind wandered to what these young adults might think of when watching the character Leper (performed by Will Allan). Just like the young audiences for Letters Home, some of our A Separate Peace students will go into the military. They will go through boot camp, maybe combat, and may themselves encounter a Leper character: another young man, awkward and on edge. I wonder if they’ll recall A Separate Peace? Will having seen our production help them transition from a boy or girl riding bikes through the neighborhood at 17 years old to a man or woman deployed in a foreign country at the age of 18? Maybe not, but I still hope that our A Separate Peace helps them to look back on their own lives and their personal experiences of wars, summer sessions, and loss.