UMKC Theatre’s Freedom Rider: a powerful chapter in an ongoing story

“This is not new. We shouldn’t pretend that it’s new,” President Obama said of the “slow-rolling crisis” surrounding race relations and recent protests in Baltimore, which couldn’t help but come to mind during a preview of UMKC Theatre’s graduate production of Freedom Rider.

Based on actual events, the deeply affecting play, taking place in 1961, draws on this country’s long, familiar history of inequality and the inevitable tensions that erupt. “They had to run, run, run,” a Howard University student in Freedom says of his family before him. “My generation is running out of breath.”

Conceived and directed by Ricardo Khan, this original work — a collaborative effort with playwrights Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, Murray Horwitz, Nathan Louis Jackson and Nikkole Salter — is a strikingly staged, powerful, sometimes funny and ultimately uplifting story of young civil rights workers, black and white.

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized nonviolent interracial protests — passive resistance à la Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. — to challenge segregation. In May of that year, it sought to integrate interstate buses and bus terminals. It would attempt to do this in the Jim Crow–era Deep South.

The tremendously courageous riders at the center of Freedom — portrayed here by Edwin Brown III, Mariem Diaz, Maya Jackson, Emily Nan Phillips, Michael Thayer, Daniel Fleming and others, many in multiple roles — faced extreme violence, even death.

Co-founder of Crossroads Theatre Co. in New Jersey, Khan is no stranger to KC as both a director and a visiting UMKC professor. His aim in theater: to “discover new, more healthy foundations upon which we can relate to one another across culture lines,” he said in 2013, when UMKC Theatre produced Kansas City Swing, a play he co-wrote and directed. (See “Stage Q&A: Ricardo Khan and UMKC Theatre score big with Kansas City Swing,” April 25, 2013).

Then as now, music plays an integral role in Khan’s storytelling, as it did in the civil rights movement. Freedom‘s rousing church choir (led by music director Mia Ramsey) gets backup from live musicians (as well as audience participation). The sparse stage’s modular set creates arresting outlines, particularly of a Greyhound bus (design by Alexander LaFrance), and the lighting adds dramatic tension (design by Devorah Kengmana and Victor En Yu Tan).

“Ultimately, it’s about telling a story, creating magic onstage, and impacting an audience so that they are somehow a little different going out than they were coming in,” Khan said of theater in 2013. Here again, his goal is accomplished.