Colored People's Time
EDITOR'S NOTE: This play has been postponed for the spring semester but may be performed at a later date.
As director of multicultural student development Calvin College's Michael Travis (left) looks for ways to educate and inspire not only Calvin students of color, but the entire campus. He is finding theatre to be a perfect way to accomplish some of his goals.
"This theatre that we do is a terrific way to expose the campus, and the community, to a history of Black people," says Travis, an accomplished local actor. "I've found that in all of the plays we have done the students are being exposed to things I took for granted."
And not just the students benefit. Audiences also find Calvin's multicultural theatre productions both entertaining and educating, especially since Travis often picks plays that are based on important social and cultural events in the history of African American people in the United States.
Travis, a Muskegon native who has been acting for a dozen years, says that holds true for the upcoming play "Colored People's Time," to be performed at Calvin March 9-11 in Gezon Auditorium at 8 p.m. each evening.
A critically acclaimed play by renowned African-American playwright Leslie Lee, "Colored People's Time" has been described as a "moving as well as humorous cavalcade of African-American history told through vignettes, song and dance." "Colored People's Time" is a chronological look at the lives of ordinary African-Americans at various moments of social change in American history.
It begins, for example, with the clandestine slave churches and works its way through to the Alabama bus boycott and the decision that segregation was unconstitutional.
The cast for the play includes 10 Calvin College students who hail from across the world (literally from California to Maine as well as Ghana and Nigeria), one Calvin staff member and an Ottawa Hills High School student.
The cast has begun rehearsals and is working not only Monday through Friday evenings, but also Saturdays in preparation for the three-day March run. Some of the students appeared in the last Calvin multicultural theatre productions, "Fires in the Mirror," performed in November 1999, and "The Colored Museum," presented in February 1999.