As its Black History Month offering, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival opened The Watsons Go to Birmingham on Friday night for performances that run only until February 23rd. Adapted by Cheryl L. West from Christopher Paul Curtis's prize-winning children's book, the story is compressed into less than 90 minutes running time by director Keith Arthur Bolden on the intimate Octagon stage.
Reminiscent of ASF's 2021 production of Shoebox Picnic Roadside that showed an extended Black family's road trip to the Jim Crow South, The Watsons... is a deceptively feel-good story of an ordinary Black family's journey from Detroit to Birmingham in the 1960s that is also a cautionary tale about racism both then and now.
Narrated by a recently traumatized middle child Kenny [Micah Hayles, who had appeared in Shoebox...], the family is headed by protectively well intentioned parents [Trisha Jeffrey and Christopher Brian Portley], and includes Kenny's siblings: Joey [a pert Caitlin Wright], and a rebellious eldest child Byron [Kal Winbourne], whose questionable behavior urged on by his pal Buphead [Cameron Williams] is the reason Mama and Daddy plan the trip for Byron to spend the Summer with Grandma Sands [Debra Walton], a no-nonsense disciplinarian who they hope will turn Byron around.
At heart, they're all good people whose love and trust in one another are the fabric of family; they do what is right, with the adults setting the tone of compassionate authority, and the children responding in kind. Especially telling are the heart-to-heart/man-to-man conversations between Kenny and Daddy.
While the children at first don't understand their parents' precautions along the drive to the South -- Mama plans everything from packing food to deciding which locations are safe by consulting the Greenbook guide for African Americans that lists safe and unsafe places for them en route, and Daddy avoids confrontations by driving though the night, and they are distracted from the dangers around them by listening to records -- they hear radio reports along the way and do learn that the color of their skin can be a trigger to rednecks and even the police.
Though Buphead may have been a bad influence on Byron, once the family arrives at Grandma's we quickly learn that Byron has "been listening" to his parents all along, and when he rescues Kenny from a whirlpool, the family bond is solid. -- On "church day" when Kenny accompanies Joey to the 16th Street Baptist Church, the trauma of the bombing and rescuing his sister brings the story full circle.
Black History Month is an ideal time to see The Watsons Go to Birmingham for important themes that impact us today.
