BY ED FELIEN
Settlement houses are generally dreary places—the poverty, noisy kids, anxious mothers. But they can also be exciting. I had read about the Henry Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and how they had theater programs for children and became a cultural center. I thought I’d like to try something like that in the black community in St. Paul at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center. I went over and talked to the director and offered to work for three-quarter pay and only work three-quarter time. She was thrilled. I started immediately.
My last quarter as a graduate student I was teaching three classes at the U, which was three-quarter time; working three-quarter time at Hallie Q. Brown; taking a full load of four classes in graduate school; rehearsing an antiwar play at night for Women Strike for Peace; beginning to write my dissertation; and for the first 10 days of the quarter I memorized enough German to pass the graduate school language exam.
At Hallie I taught creative dramatics to 5th and 6th grade kids. We’d read a story or nursery rhyme and then we’d act it out. The kids loved it and I think it helped them gain confidence and verbal fluency. I recruited a local scholar to teach a black history class—the first in the Twin Cities. He went on to a good job at Macalester College. And I offered a class in adult literacy. I had a few students, but they mostly fell away, but one stayed with me for about six weeks. The first night I asked her what was the most important thing that had ever happened to her. She said she’d been in an automobile accident and the car had turned over. I asked her to describe the event. Then we started writing the event. Painfully, for six weeks, she kept coming back and we’d go over what she’d written, talk about the event and maybe write another sentence. When we finally finished, she read the paragraph aloud, jumped up with a great smile on her face and ran out of the room. I never saw her again, but she was probably my greatest triumph as a teacher.
On Saturdays we would have art classes for kids in the morning thanks to a friend of mine, and entertainment at 3 o’clock that could be a magician or singers or jugglers and clowns. Sundays we had performances by local jazz musicians. It was all free and lots of fun. But it was a lot of work.
Some leftie friends approached me and asked me if I wanted to sponsor a DuBois Club at Hallie. I didn’t know much about W. E. B. DuBois, but I knew he was a black scholar, started the NAACP and eventually went to Ghana. He was also a Marxist. The young people that wanted me to sponsor the club at Hallie were all Red Diaper Babies, the children and grandchildren of Communists. At that point SDS was not allowing Marxists or Communists into their organization, so Marxist parents wanted an organization of their own for their kids. We mostly sat around and talked on Saturday mornings. My attempts to get them to actually get out and do some organizing in the neighborhood was met with skepticism, apathy and, finally, abandonment. But it was fun while it lasted. There were parties, weddings and a convention in Chicago that I found out later was duly recorded by the FBI Red Squad.
We also produced plays. A jazz musician approached me. He had written a musical about the civil rights movement, “Some of My Best Friends Are.” It was fun, a little corny, but it played well. I found a cast and a wonderful woman to direct it, while I tried to get stage lights, props and costumes. It was free, ran one weekend and played to packed houses.
The next year I thought I’d try something more serious. I had always wanted to do a production of Euripides’ play “The Bacchae” with a black Dionysius and a white Pentheus. There is a line in the play that suggests Dionysius comes from a more exotic place than Thebes. There is one dramatic reversal in the play that is spectacular. Dionysius has been upsetting the town, and Pentheus confronts him. In the space of only about a dozen lines Dionysius changes Pentheus from a moral puritan into a voyeuristic transvestite. Pentheus is trying to stop Dionysius from luring all the women out of town into the woods where they dance and act like animals. Dionysius seduces Pentheus by asking, “Don’t you want to watch them play in the forest?” Pentheus admits he does. Dionysius then says he will have to dress like them so he won’t be noticed. Transfixed with the possibility of seeing erotic fantasies, Dionysius leads Pentheus off the stage in a daze. Of course it ends badly for Pentheus. A messenger tells us that Dionysius convinces Pentheus that he should climb a tree to get a better look at the dancing women. Dionysius then tells the women that Pentheus is a tiger in the tree, and Agave, Pentheus’s mother, slays the tiger and brings Pentheus’s head in on the top of her spear. Gradually, she is brought to her senses and realizes with horror what she has done, and the play ends with the recognition of the divine power of eros and the need to steer a balanced course between repression and frenzy.
The actor I had cast as Pentheus dropped out after realizing how difficult the role would be, so, in the midst of my other responsibilities, I took that on as well. I thought it went rather well, but the staff at Hallie much preferred the more accessible musical we had produced the previous year.
Almost 20 years later on leaving a production of a play at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis I ran into a former colleague from the Rhetoric Department. He had been the only one to come and see my production of “The Bachae” at Hallie. We had been talking about the Guthrie production (which had nothing to do with “The Bachae”) when, out of nowhere, he said, “When you did that play in St. Paul you looked like you were high on drugs.” I realized, then, that my friend had been part of the group that denounced me. “It’s called acting,” I said, and walked away.
