At the end of a week that included a celebration of Martin Luther King’s 80th birthday and the historic inauguration of the first African-American president of the United States, First Stage Children’s Theater opens a play that captures some truths, both historical and contemporary, about our country’s race relations.
John Maclay, director of First Stage’s “Witness,” opening Friday, Jan. 23, told The Chronicle in a telephone interview last week, that while he is personally proud of our nation for this step forward, he thinks “it’s important that we all remember that we have a way to go, and that we don’t have the luxury of forgetting about some pretty dark moments.” Maclay is First Stage’s assistant artistic director and theater academy director.
Based on the novel by Newberry Award-winning author Karen Hesse, “‘Witness,’ both focuses on a dark moment, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and … on an incredibly positive moment when an entire state kicked them out, more or less,” Maclay said.
“Witness” is set in 1924, toward the end of a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan that began after World War I, in reaction to a large influx of immigrants, a backlash against the Jazz Age and other factors. The location is a small town in Vermont, to which a black family and a Jewish widower and his daughter have recently moved.
The role of the Jewish girl, Esther Hirsh, which like all of the young actor roles was double cast, is being played by twins Alexandra and Sydney Salter, 9, of Germantown. They are fourth-graders at MacArthur Elementary School, and attend religious school at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun.
This is their first professional role, they said in an interview at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, last week. But they have appeared in a play written by their parents.
Their father, Eric Salter explained that he and his wife, Heidi Salter, had both participated in theater — she, since she was younger than her daughters are now, and he, in high school and after college. In fact, they met while performing in a community theater production.
Heidi’s dream to start a theater company combined with a desire to give their daughters more theatrical experience, led the couple to write a play, which they produced in Germantown last summer. They auditioned more than 40 children and cast 22, Eric said.
In “Witness,” some of the town’s residents, including its fundamentalist minister, have joined the Klan and are recruiting others.
“Different characters get caught up with the Klan for different reasons. Some are pretty quickly onto the Klan as being a fairly negative organization and some characters we see learn that throughout the play,” Maclay said.
Some of the characters learn that “it becomes very difficult to generalize negatively about large groups of people once you start getting to know actual individuals,” Maclay said.
And with the arrival of the Klan, some of the townspeople take issue with the presence of the black and Jewish families, but others get to know the Jewish store owner “and realize that he’s just a delightful, generous, wonderful man,” Maclay said.
Similarly, the African American girl in the play performs a great public show of heroism, Maclay said. She risks her life to save someone else’s. Once the townspeople see that, they are “forced to look on her differently.”
First Stage has been interested in producing this play for years. But it’s a challenging and expensive play to do because there are nine professional, adult roles in the cast, which is a very big cast for them, Maclay said.
But Maclay, and the company’s artistic director, Jeff Frank, felt it was just too important a play to pass up. They worked directly with the playwright, John Urquhart, which enabled them to make changes, such as moving scenes, Maclay said.
“Witness” fits the type of shows that First Stage puts on. “They all have some message of hope, some message of optimism that the world will get better. That’s a big part of who we are as a company. We work with young people because we think the next generation will be even stronger,” Maclay said.
As for the twins, Maclay said, “they are very smart. They’re young [the youngest actors in the cast] but they work with an incredible amount of maturity.”
For their part, Alex and Sydney said the experience has been fun and helped them meet many new friends. They have learned a lot from their older friends, both girls agreed, such as how to project their voices and speak loudly enough to be heard.
The hardest thing, they said, has been that they are “tight on time.” For most of the time they’ve been rehearsing, they come on alternate nights and stay until 8:30 p.m. They do their homework in the car, they said.
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