[NYTr] Rebel Voices: A Call for Civil Disobedience

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Alternet - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/68359/

Howard Zinn's Rebel Voices: A Call for Civil Disobedience

By Andre Banks

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." -- Mark Twain

What does civil disobedience sound like? It sounds like Sojourner Truth
and Frederick Douglas, Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie, parents who've
lost their children in war and Gulf Coast residents betrayed by their
country. It sounds like a history that many of us have forgotten ...
until now.

Rebel Voices, opening this week at The Cultural Project in New York,
provides a full course in the struggles that have shaped America from
its inception to the present day. Through staged dramatic readings, the
show unites the full humor and depth of iconic figures we celebrate but
don't bother to read, and those individuals on the margins whose voices
drove movements for change.

Rebel Voices is the dramatic counterpart to Howard Zinn and Anthony
Arnove's Voice of a People's History of the United States. The show,
written by Rob Urbinati brings together American voices pulled from
speeches, articles, memoirs and interviews to highlight a national
tradition in short supply in recent years: civil disobedience.

Performed by a permanent cast of actors with Danny Glover, Eve Ensler,
Lili Taylor and Staceyann Chin rotating in to bring additional
star-power, the show blends the words of our most celebrated orators
with the powerful voices of everyday women and men who fought against
impossible odds to change their lives and their country.

The show presents these voices, moving chronologically across the
expanse of American history. There are familiar echoes here like
Sojourner Truth's famous "Ain't I A Woman" and Frederick Douglas,'
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?"

But the show reminds us that these great speeches weren't always Black
history month clichés. In fact, the words still burn; Douglas' elegant
excoriation of white liberalism and Truth's pioneering understanding of
the intersection between the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage
are presented here to great effect. It is political language at its
best, beautiful, alive and inspiring.

Rebel Voices also features an intriguing selection of other texts and
characters that you'll be shocked you don't know. Of particular note
are the U.S. Strategic Bombing Report's secrets of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Anne Moody's first-hand account of a lunch-counter sit-in,
and a trio of labor and housing activists from the 1930s whose
radicalism will remind us how many of our grandmothers got to be so
tough. While not every voice rings as clearly as it might have in its
historical moment, many have aged well and offer both inspiration and
insight into our present political predicament.

The production allows the unique opportunity to enjoy some of the
greatest speeches ever delivered as if you were in the original
audience. Through a simple but active staging the actors succeed in
walking you through the decades with a steady pace, alternating between
fist pounding rhetoric and the most private confessions. The show also
features the rebel voices found in the songs of protest by Woodie
Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Roy Ayers, performed by Allison Moorer.

While the dramatic edge of certain moments is dulled by their popular
identification, like Malcolm X's "by any means necessary," the
descriptions of important historical moments, past and present, by
ordinary people are complex and compelling.

It is these quite moments of Rebel Voices that truly deliver. The
audience becomes a part of intimate conversation with parents whose son
was lost at war or a woman convinced her inability to leave pre-Katrina
New Orleans was anything but a mistake. It is the power of language to
change our minds and reshape our ideas that we are reminded of in these
exchanges -- the simple but civilly disobedient act of telling the
unofficial truth as we've lived it, despite the consequences.

Rebel Voices reminds us of the power of the spoken word, the
possibility of language to illuminate injustice and the full arc of
history that never makes it into a textbook. And in doing so connects
the great words and thinkers of the past to bring history's rhyme into
the present.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.