Page 8 The Skanner Portland & Seattle March 27, 2019
News
PassinArt Presents ‘The NO Play’
The Skanner
T
he racially charged
words on a road
sign placed at the
entrance of a small
Southern town is not
only the title of the lat-
est play in production by
PassinArt. It is also a re-
minder of how America’s
racist history serves as
a symbolic cipher of our
future - if we allow it.
“Except for the fact you
know it’s 1949, the issues
are the same as today,”
notes David Meyers, a
longtime
professional
actor on stage, televi-
sion and film and radio,
who portrays the script’s
only non-Black charac-
ter. “What we thought
we had conquered in this
country simply went be-
hind closed doors.”
“The NO Play,” which
runs March 15 through
April 14 at the Interstate
Firehouse Cultural Cen-
ter, 5340 N Interstate
Ave., centers around
the pre-World War II
experiences of an Afri-
can American family,
the Cheeks, living in the
backwoods of a North
Carolina town that was
purposely created to
be White-only. Meyer’s
character, a Jewish schol-
ar, pays the Cheeks fam-
ily to help him research
a book that compares
the effects of anti-Black
prejudice with anti-Sem-
itism.
“I can hear the voices
of my history in these
characters,” says Dram-
my Award-winning ac-
tor and director Andrea
White, whose ethnicity
is both Jewish and Afri-
can American. In “The
NO Play,” she portrays
the church-going, fierce-
ly principled matriarch,
Mattie Cheeks. “It’s a
daunting thing but it’s
beautiful, too, to give
these people voice.”
PassinArt, which was
founded in 1982, tends to
produce plays written by
PHOTO COURTESY OF PASSINART
John Henry Redwood III’s play, which runs through
April 14, portrays Black and Jewish characters in a
Southern town meant to be White-only
James Dixon and Andrea White star in “The NO Play,” which runs through April 14 in Portland.
Black playwrights about
the Black experience and
addresses critical – and
at times, provocative –
issues facing the Black
community. PassinArt’s
artistic director, Jerry
Foster, said he shelved
“The NO Play” script for
years before Foster de-
cided to introduce it as
the last production of
PassinArt’s 2018-19 sea-
son. It was written by
John Henry Redwood III,
who died in 2003.
According to Foster,
Redwood didn’t give the
play a title until after he
wrote it, which was his
artistic process.
Foster then called on
William Earl Ray of Tex-
as to shape the produc-
tion. Ray has directed
several plays for Pas-
sinArt over the last 18
years, including August
Wilson’s “Two Trains
Running” last year, for
which Ray was nominat-
ed for a Drammy Award.
The second character
in “The NO Play” is Rawl
Cheeks, played by James
Dixon – who was raised
in North Carolina. Rawl
wants to save enough
money to send his two
daughters to college. So,
the Cheeks family be-
grudgingly develops a
close relationship with
Jack to supplement the
income that Rawl earns
by “digging up White
folks’ graves” in Ala-
bama.
As the South was a
dangerous place for
non-Whites after dark,
the characters in the
play develop a familiar
chemistry and often en-
courage each other to “be
safe.” Once Rawl leaves
the state, however, the
females are left unpro-
tected.
Overall, “The NO Play”
is about an African
American woman strug-
gling to raise her two
daughters and protect
her marriage. It tests the
strength of family bonds,
love and elevates the is-
sue of forgiveness.
“As our audiences
in Portland are most-
ly White, I would want
them to walk away ac-
knowledging that peo-
ple of different experi-
ences have things that
happened to them – just
See NO PLAY on page 5
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