Plays are topical and timely

Few playwrights have had portions of their works read during a U.S. Senate hearing. Frank Higgins, an instructor in playwriting, theatre history and dramaturgy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, may be the only one.

It’s a distinction that originates in tragedy. In 1991, a student shot and killed 5 others and then himself on the University of Iowa campus. As the people of Iowa City tried to make sense of such a senseless act, the staff of the nearby Riverside Theatre began a national search for a dramatist to write a play about firearms. Kansas City author Frank Higgins was chosen, and the result was “Gunplay,” a drama that opened in 1993 in small Iowa towns, drawing appreciative audiences and a few protests by gun-rights activists.

Higgins earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UMKC in the 1970s. Since 2007, he has taught playwriting at UMKC. He continues to mine real incidents that illuminate how reality is passed along to subsequent generations.

In the aftermath of the Iowa City shooting, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, so named because of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan that left his press secretary, James Brady, unable to walk. Readings from the play were part of Congressional testimony heard before the vote was taken. His life and health were complicated by the effects of the shooting, and Brady died this year.

One of Higgins’s plays, “99 Ways,” was featured in Kansas City’s 2014 Fringe Festival; “Black Pearl Sings” was included in a recently-published Random House anthology; and “The True Death of Socrates” is part of “The Best American Short Plays 2012-2013,” published in August 2014.

“Black Pearl Sings” is set in 1933 and is based on the true experience of a Library of Congress researcher, Alan Lomax, who was trying to preserve traditional slave tunes. Lomax’s investigation took him to a men’s prison, where he formed a relationship with one particular inmate, popularly known as “Lead Belly.” Higgins uses women as these central characters.

The lyrics in some of the prisoner’s songs seemed akin to nonsense rhymes. The truth is, they are scraps of African songs, remembered and repeated among slaves until all but a few words and phrases were lost.

A documentary, “The Language You Cry In,” authenticates this story. Bits of song and text survived hundreds of years and thousands of miles, originating in the 1700s in Sierra Leone and finding their way to people of modern-day Georgia. “Black Pearl Sings!” will be produced in Kansas City during the Spinning Tree Theatre’s 2015 season.

“The True Death of Socrates” dramatizes, with much humor, the ignoble death of the great philosopher, completely unlike the stories handed down by his best-known pupil, Aristotle. The play hinges on Aristotle’s desire to keep Socrates’ image and reputation intact, and provided the editor with a model for inclusion in the Best American Short Plays collection.

“Aristotle and his lackey, Doofus, force the hemlock on Socrates, then start working out lies they can tell to future generations,” said Higgins. “They want an ideal philosopher for posterity, a paragon of all that is good and honest.”

Blythe Danner and her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, gave a Higgins play, “The Sweet By ‘n’ By,” its official premier in Williamstown, Mass. The play, a Second Stage production at the Missouri Repertory Theatre in 1989, is set in a poor West Virginia coal mining community. Paltrow and Danner portrayed a mother and daughter trying to find a better life.
Another activity that keeps Higgins connected to issues in modern culture is teaching playwriting classes at UMKC. Students enrolled in his classes have the benefit of his professional and personal experience. This year’s Fringe Festival included plays by eight of Higgins’s former UMKC students.  Higgins knows what clicks with audiences and uses a collaborative, supportive style of teaching and critiquing.

Higgins was asked if, in light of recent events, there was renewed interest in “Gunplay.”

“With the ‘wave’ – why does that metaphor get used? – of school shootings across the country, one would think that ‘Gunplay’ would get a lot of productions, but not so,” Higgins replied. “I guess it’s too much of a hot button issue.”

That won’t interfere with Higgins’ exploration of truth and reality. It has served him well so far.