So about a year after getting downsized at Fred Meyer, I hooked up with a small Portland advertising agency, Turtledove/Clemens. I basically got hired because I knew a few decision-makers. Didn’t do any good and I was gone by Independence Day. But I learned some stuff and pumped some stock and kept my condo a little longer. Originally titled “Justice Southern-Style.” THIS WEEK column, August 9, 1989. – JDW
For some few weeks this spring I had the privilege of employment with one of Portland’s leading advertising agencies. I met some interesting people there; one of the more intriguing was a 34-year-old writer named Dave Kanner. He seemed the embodiment of that old bromide, “still waters run deep.”
A number of evenings I watched Dave rush out at 5:01 p.m. Obviously, he was a man on his way to someplace special. Obviously, he was up to something… something important. What Dave Kanner was up to was the production of his first play. The world premiere of “Southern Justice” opened recently at the Columbia Theater Company, Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. I was there.
“Southern Justice” is based on a murder trial that actually took place twelve (12) years ago in Fayetteville, N.C. People vs. Terry Wayne McDougal. The play is a courtroom drama that does not attempt to accurately present the facts of that case.
I’m willing to wager it communicates much of the reality.
A white high school football star, six(6)-feet-tall and 190 pounds, the most popular kid around, the president of the student body, has been killed in a locker room fight with a classmate, who’s five(5)-feet-eight, 140, quiet, poor and black. The judge is a good ol’ boy. You can almost see the red on his neck from the seats in the back of the room. Twelve years ago, as a radio reporter for WFLB, Dave Kanner was there.
“Southern Justice is an intense message play. Most of the message comes from two journalists. Curtis Jones is black, the publisher of a one-page mimeographed monthly newsletter that seeks to tell the Truth, primarily, if not entirely, to a disenfranchised black community in a supposedly progressive town in the New South. Curtis is a totally fictional character, a device to create the tension necessary to entertain.“
Dave Smith is white, a brash, young radio reporter from the North, who is infinitely more interested in breaking a story than he is concerned with understanding what that story might mean. Dave, of course, is a role that is part caricature, part photograph. The interaction between those two men is clearly the heart of the play.
And that is how it should be, says Kanner. “The play is not about a trial; it’s about the relationship between Curtis and Dave. The trial is so intense that people tend to focus on that aspect. That was not my intent.”
Kanner’s intent is obvious. It’s been obvious since he walked into that Superior Court that summer day in 1977. It was just his second job out of college, but he knew he was involved in something. Something important.
“I have always thought there was some cosmic reason I was in Fayetteville then,” the playwright offers about his very first experience south of the Mason-Dixon line. “I was only there for nine (9) months. There was no one from that time who made a lasting impression. Nothing. except the trial. I watched it. I became involved, and I said to myself, “God has handed me a script.'”
The Big Fella has given us all a script, but Dave Kanner has actually written his. And he’s gotten it produced, and it is now playing at 8 p.m., every Thursday, Friday and Saturday through August 26.
And Portlanders are busy buying tickets to see the work of one of their own. The opening night audience was the largest in CTC’s history and word-of-mouth praise appears strong. Interestingly, the first night’s crowd was entirely white – with perhaps two exceptions – while the next night, fully half of those in attendance were black. “Black people respond to this play much more strongly than do white people, says Kanner, who is himself white.
How does the average theater-goer review a play?
“I think you have to ask yourself three questions,” Dave explained. “Was it entertaining? Did it arouse emotions within me? Did it challenge me to think?”
“To me, the whole play is allegorical,” says the author, who should know. “Dave represents white America; Curtis represents black America. They’re constantly fighting each other, but they need each other. That’s very much the dynamic that’s occurring in our society today. The black defendant is neither seen nor heard. He represents the black underclass.”
“There’s nowhere to go,” says Curtis Jones, speaking for all the accused in all the places where racism exists. It’s his final line, and it reminds us, that, yes, it happens in North Carolina.
But what Dave Kanner wants us to remember, this trial could’ve happened anywhere.
Even in Portland. Even here.
http://newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn83045120/1977-09-03/ed-1/seq-1.pdf
