When It's Deep Enough to Swallow Me Whole opens Friday, June 18, at the Bethel Cultural Arts Center in Chicago's West Garfield Park/ Austin community. It's by, for, and about the residents of Chicago's West Side. This part of Chicago is often portrayed as among the city's most challenged areas since the blockbusting, rapid racial change and attendant massive riots of the 1960s and 1970s. But residents have long maintained that, 'The West Side is the best side.'
Local knowledge and local heroes—community organizers, musicians, and stalwart neighborhood leaders, as well as individuals coming back from drug abuse and crime—take center stage in this new play.
Bethel New Life, a nationally known community development corporation (CDC) celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, commissioned the piece and helped cast community residents to play some of the 62 different characters in the two-act play, which consists of 15 tightly choreographed vignettes that feature words and music. The source of the text is oral histories collected by staff and interns of Bethel New Life. The community arts performance stems from the Bethel Cultural Arts Center exhibition, 'Steppin' Up: Journeys from the Soul' inspired by The Former Living Together exhibit at the Field Museum.
The play has been written and directed by the staff of Community Performance, Inc., and Scrap Mettle Soul, their Chicago-based group affiliate known across the country for its ability to create theater pieces based on real-life stories of everyday people that become catalysts for community growth and empowerment. The group has been recognized for its successes with Swamp Gravy in Colquitt, Georgia, and the Scrap Mettle Soul efforts elsewhere.
This is not your typical play. There's no hero. Instead, the community is the main character and we find out its personality and follow its journey through the individual stories and struggles of its members. The story moves from a group of neighbors filling potholes the city has ignored through trials and tribulations that will be recognized by West Siders and others as typical experiences, with anecdotes that focus on how individuals have overcome those trials.
'The whole idea of filling in the places that have been missing is the central theme,' says Playwright Jules Corriere, who poured over 25 CDs of recorded oral histories to find the texts on which she based the play. 'People are now coming to fill in places that have been left open. In some sense, the neighborhood has changed but people are stepping into roles that were vacated: roles of leadership, roles of action, and really reclaiming the work that was started by the wonderful generation from the 1960s.'
'When It's Deep Enough to Swallow Me Whole will bring to light positive things happening on the West Side,' said C.C. Carter, director of Bethel New Life's Cultural Arts Program. 'The arts have been a catalyst for social change. This play seeks not so much to produce change as to inform our people about how we have soldiered on, about the real ways real people worked together to win real victories in our community.'
Those victories include the stories of Spann, founder and president of the Northwest Austin Council community group, O'Quinn, longtime arts educator in the community and founder in 1962 of the celebrated Royal Gladiators Drum and Bugle Corps, and Hunter, one of the first African Americans admitted to The Juilliard School in New York City. The play tells their stories as well as those of youth in the neighborhood today, in a series of 15 vignettes across two acts that trace everyday challenges on the West Side from the civil-rights era to the present.
Steppin' Up: Journeys from the Soul is a multimedia exhibition at the Bethel Cultural Arts Center that showcases the life stories—and shoes—of national and local leaders who have played significant roles in the civil rights, free speech and women's movements, business, government, labor, education, sports, the arts, and other arenas of life. It was made possible through a partnership between Bethel New Life and Chicago's Field Museum. The exhibition includes stories and shoes, many of which came from West Side residents, with audio, music, print, and video presentations.
Community Performance, Inc. works with diverse communities across the U.S. to collect local stories and shape them into professional quality performances. The process of story collection and developing the performance itself becomes a medium through which local participants relate to their neighbors and themselves. CPI artists—directors, writers, lighting experts and scenic designers—work with community members to craft performances based on share history.
The play will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 18 and Saturday, June 19, at 3 p.m. Sunday June 20, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 25 and at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 27. All performances will be held in the Bethel Cultural Arts Center, 1140 N. Lamon, two blocks south of Division Street and one block west of Cicero Avenue, in Chicago. Suggested donation is $25; limited income, seniors, and youth suggested donation is $10. Call (773) 378-3600
