By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times
What happens when two friends, one Black, one white, who have been acquaintances for two decades open a business together when the topic of race is a difficult conversation to have? Can their friendship survive an honest discussion about how they truly feel?
Those are questions Marci Duncan and Kerry Sandell, Florida-based actor-writers in a new play titled “Dissonance”, a 90-minute two-person drama asks during Red Mountain Theatre Company’s 7TH Annual Human Rights New Works Festival starting Friday, September 20 through Sunday, September 22.
The three-day event features four new pieces including a reading of “Dissonance”, Saturday, September 21 at 2 p.m. at the Red Mountain Theatre.
“This play is about two friends opening up a café together, and because of some events that happen, they now have to be honest with one another,” said Alabama-based playwright and actress, Marci Duncan. “They have to talk about things that they have never really talked about before. They dodged it. They’ve ducked it, but they’ve never really had an honest conversation about race.”
In the reading, Angela, a Black woman, played by Duncan and Lauren, a White woman, played by Sandell, met in graduate school, became godmothers to each other’s children. As they open their cafe in a historic Black neighborhood in Pensacola, Florida, they uncover deeply held perceptions that threaten to dismantle their friendship.
The play is set just after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, who was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the hands of a white police officer that sparked a series of protest against police brutality nationally and globally.
Four years later some of the same issues that sparked a conversation around race remain, said the playwrights.
“[The play] is timely,” said Sandell. “It was timely when we wrote it. It timely again as we go into political season, and some of that is [because] of what we saw in the media, and what we saw in social media back then, and now we are seeing it again. We are very much divided. It shows a portrait of us as Americans or as humans,” Sandell said.
Following the summer of the Floyd murder, Sandell remembers coming to see Duncan in a play at the Emerald Coast Theater Company in DESTIN. “She had been on my heart a lot,” Sandell recalled.
Adding, “I’m a mom. She’s a mom, we had 19, 20 years old sons at the time, so I had been thinking about her as a mom and thinking about the conversations she was having with her son, Jamari, versus the conversations I was having with my son and how they were different. After that [visit] I asked her how she was doing and if she had a second to talk and I just shared that with her.”
Sandell said she told Duncan that she believed that they should write a play about the conversations. “We’re both theater artists and that’s kind of a natural way actors and theater artists make sense of the world by talking it out, by storytelling, by narratives,” said Sandell.
Sandell, who serves as an Academic Advisor for the College of Science and Engineering at the University of West Florida said she met Duncan from an acting class.
“I had actually taken an acting class with her (Duncan) at the theater department, and we just had a professional working relationship and didn’t really know each other beyond acquaintances. We would say we were friends, but we didn’t have an intimate relationship before we started this project,” Sandell said.
Duncan, who teaches acting and directing at the University of West Florida where she is the director of the acting program, said honest talks can be healthy “especially when the end goal is unity and understanding and not necessarily to win or to be right. I think that’s what we need. We need to hear each other. We need to understand each other, even if we don’t agree, we still need to be able to talk to one another.”
This is Duncan’s playwriting debut and Sandell’s first play collaboration. Marci and Kerry extend invitation to Dissonance, (youtube.com)
During the pandemic while most were under quarantine, Duncan and Sandell met via zoom and wrote over a shared Google document.
“We had these conversations that Lauren and Angela have in the play in a different set of circumstances, but we had these conversations about race and asking each other questions about what your first experience or awareness of race? What do you believe about this? Some taboo things that I might not naturally ask her,” Sandell said. “We have difficult conversations but it’s not a scary play. It’s shows one way that people can have a conversation about race.”
“We keep telling this story because we want people to understand just random conversations with strangers about race, that’s not productive. It doesn’t work. Conversations with people who you are in a relationship with, I think that’s where you should start,” said Duncan. “As long as your end goal is to understand, and to bring unity, I think those are healthy discussions to have with one another.”
Red Mountain Theater Company’s 7TH Annual Human Rights New Works Festival, Friday, September 20 through Sunday, September 22. The three-day event features four new pieces including, a reading of Dissonance, a two-woman play about race, love, and friendship held Saturday, September 21st at 2 p.m. For more visit here.
