Presented at KC Rep’s Copaken Stage, Michael Benjamin Washington’s Blueprints to Freedom celebrates the contribution of Bayard Rustin, architect of the March on Washington.
Only a few years ago, actor and playwright Michael Benjamin Washington was unaware of historic civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the primary architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“I was doing a reading of a play in New York, and the director mentioned Bayard Rustin,” Washington recalled. “And I had no idea who that was.”
That’s because Rustin—a brilliant pacifist thinker and a pivotal mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. —was the man behind the man who had a dream.
Intrigued, Washington did some research including delving into a book of Rustin’s revealing letters. He discovered that Rustin, although in his youth a nightclub singer, didn’t seek the civil rights spotlight for reasons influenced by the times he lived in, including his previous communist ties and the fact that he was living as a relatively open gay man.
Washington learned that Rustin was raised by a Pennsylvania family dedicated to civil rights, that he traveled to India to immerse himself in Gandhi’s non-violent resistance movement and that he co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to provide a suitable stage for King’s powerful rhetoric of peace, freedom and equality for “all of God’s children.”
Then Washington reflected on how the craft of theater could create an exceptional portal to explain and extol Rustin’s individual legacy: “I thought, ‘I wonder what someone’s going to do for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington?’ And I decided, ‘Well, that should be me.’ And so I wrote a play about Bayard Rustin constructing the March on Washington.”
The resulting Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin is a five-character play that takes place during the two months leading up to the momentous march. Featuring Washington in the title role, the show received its world premiere as a co-production of Kansas City Repertory Theatre earlier this fall at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Current performances starring Washington are scheduled through Nov. 15 at the Rep’s Copaken Stage.
“I don’t think half of the battles that we won would have been won without Bayard Rustin,” Washington said of the struggles and sacrifices experienced by countless African Americans and others during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. “Because of his organizational and strategic mind, he was able to put the blueprint in place that we needed. And Dr. King was able to be a spokesman, with his eloquence and his oratorical genius and his pulpit and his pedigree that gave him the platform needed to shine the message so that the biggest audience would hear it.”
Although the close working relationship between King and Rustin is a key element of Washington’s play, its main emphasis is on Rustin’s “tumultuous walk of faith,” he said.
“Imagine being exiled and marginalized for the better part of your professional and personal life,” he said. “And then your great assignment comes. Where would you have been spiritually? Where would you have been emotionally? And we explore that and the obstacle course of finding his way back to grace through it all.”
And it’s all accomplished with occasional notes of light-heartedness, which audiences appreciate, Washington said. And he should know, having acted in the original 2001 production of the frolicsome Broadway people-pleaser, Mamma Mia!; the 2005 revival of the comedic Broadway hit, La Cage Aux Folles, and such popular TV sitcoms as “30 Rock.”
“I’ve learned the power of humor in my work, in terms of keeping an audience engaged, and that has helped tremendously,” Washington said. “And if you’re going to do a show about historical events as important as the March on Washington, you want to have some sense of levity, instead of it just being ‘punch-you-in-the-face’ with a lot of drama.
“There has to be some sense of lightness to it, because, as difficult as those times were during the civil rights movement, those people also had personalities and humor that got them through. The humanity is often going to come from what makes us laugh, as well as what makes us cry.”
Washington, a Dallas native who shuttles between New York and Los Angeles, has written other emotionally wide-ranging works to keep his acting muscle in shape, including the one-man show, Letters to Barack, in which he played a quintet of characters expressing feelings about America after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama.
But Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin is Washington’s first major production of a full-fledged play. He’s grateful for the opportunity. And not only for himself.
“I feel like every little thing that I’ve written to keep myself engaged over the past 15 years has all led to this,” he said. “And that’s not to put any pressure on myself. It’s the responsibility to stay the course and keep working on your craft, because something great can come out of it one day. And this man’s story being told is a great, great thing to come out of it.” o
Blueprints to Freedom continues through Nov. 15 at KC Rep’s Copaken Stage, located in H&R Block’s downtown headquarters at 13th and Walnut Streets. Tickets start at $25. For tickets, 816-235-2700 or KCRep.org.
