Rise Up

Lisa Evans

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781783199938
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783199945
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Winner of Best Play for Young Audiences in the Writers' Guild Awards 2016

The tide was turning – though local governments disagreed, it would soon be illegal to segregate black Americans from white Americans on public buses, in waiting rooms or in restaurants. And yet – in the early 1960s, many states across the south of America kept discriminating against African-Americans… In modern day Britain, four actor-storytellers tell the stories of the Freedom Riders – principled citizens riding buses across Alabama and Mississippi, drawing attention to this illegal discrimination, and facing up to terrifying violence with peaceful resistance. The story of the Freedom Riders is one of ordinary people becoming a civil rights movement, taking on the establishment and changing the world. In a time of Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Mark Duggan, what does it mean for people to come together and rise up?

SCENE 1

Only EM, TY and DAYZ are on stage in an awkward pre-set waiting to start the show. TY looks at his watch. EM shrugs. They start without CJ.

BRITISH ACTORS’ SPOKEN WORD: ENSEMBLE

It’s quite okay to be scared.

It’s all right to feel fright.

Only fools aren’t afraid

When they challenge the might

Of how it is now and has always been done,

So what if it’s wrong and that some

One, somewhere is underfoot.

It’s how you move the air before you.

There are forces out there

CJ enters, shades on, earphones in, happily unaware he’s late. Suddenly gets it, shocked the others carry on valiantly while he acts being ‘very quiet’ and mouthing ‘sorry’, thereby drawing attention to himself.

Want no good to bear

From the hopes and the dreams of a better world,

Who don’t see the beauty of all that’s around you,

beyond you, Framed in the windows of a greyhound bus.

TY: Stop. Stop.

TY glares at CJ. EM is exaggeratedly patient.

CJ: You started without me.

EM: Because you was late.

CJ: I forgot the time.

EM: That doesn’t make it any earlier.

CJ: Wasn’t my fault. It was er…

He looks to the audience for support, for an excuse. He comes up with one and then enjoys embellishing it.

The bus. Yeah, and the train, the coach, the plane. (To audience.) Gridlock. Yeah.

Yeah they were late, full, couldn’t get on, couldn’t get off, got stuck in the door, lost my ticket, lost my pass. Nightmare.

EM: He forgot to go to the toilet.

CJ grins, she’s right. DAYZ brings on his white bow.

TY: Again.

CJ: Sorree.

(To audience.) Man got to look his best. Know what I mean? And on the subject, I’m not wearing no bow in my hair.

He drops the bow on the floor. DAYZ picks it up.

EM: Act like a doormat, girl, that’s how they’ll treat you.

DAYZ: Sorry. Sorry.

TY: Can we get on, please?

CJ: I’m not wearing no little old lady hats neither. I got an image, you know what I’m saying?

EM: It is 1961, United States of America, where all men are created equal.

CJ: Except in the Southern States which have their own rules – called Jim Crow – about who can go where.

EM: People have been protesting against segregation in movie theatres, schools, and restaurants but things aren’t moving fast enough, especially on the interstate buses travelling through the deep South where white people

(She indicates CJ.)

sit up front.

CJ: I told you, no more old lady hats.

TY: You’re an actor.

CJ: So, I’ll act being a white lady. It’ll be cool.

TY: (Worried.) He’ll screw it up.

EM: (To audience.) White people, like this little old lady (CJ.) sit up the front of the buses. And black people (TY.) sit at the back.

TY: In the bus stations, there’s clean white toilets and white restaurants out the front, and out back there’s crummy black toilets, and sometimes, for blacks only, the kinda restaurant even the roaches ignore.

CJ: And you do not go in the wrong one – oh man, you don’t.

DAYZ: Until now – when the Congress of Racial Equality asks for volunteers to become Freedom Riders who will set out to change the world by simply boarding a bus.

ALL: And Jim Crow said

CJ: Who?

TY: You know. Beat. You do know.

CJ: (Lying.) I do. But tell me again anyway?

TY: White folks in the south who believe in the Jim Crow rules. And the Klan, man. White supremacist Southern dudes like dressing up in long white robes, little pointy hats. And burning crosses.

CJ: (Remembering.) Hate blacks, Jews, immigrants, well most people except themselves. I remember now.

TY: Good.

ALL: And Jim Crow said.

ENSEMBLE SPOKEN WORD

JIM CROW/TY: You getting on the bus?
You know where you supposed to sit?

EM: And the Riders said.

RIDERS talk to the audience.

RIDER/CJ: You brave enough to get on the bus?

JIM CROW/TY: You know the rules?

JIM CROW/DAYZ: Ain’t the same for everyone, no sir.

RIDER/CJ: Y’all getting on the bus be prepared for trouble.

RIDER/EM: They taking bad behaviour to a whole new level.

JIM CROW/TY: You sit where you allowed or you git.
This ain’t a matter of choice, oh no, so,
This the way it’s done this side of the line.

JIM CROW/DAYZ: Don’t come sniffing round my place cos
What’s mine is mine
and has always been and that’s fine
by me and my kind.

RIDER/CJ: We don’t ask for no trouble we just come to say
Our dollar’s the same and when we pay
for a ticket to ride all the way
from DC down to New Orleans,

RIDER/EM: Need a pee or a cuppa tea or a place to be,

RIDER/CJ: W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Scene 1
• By the same Author