The play “I Know the Secret” opens with Oprah-esque talk show host Mildred Tappe interviewing a man who, after winning the lottery, wants to leave his wife.
He’s even willing to give her half of his winnings because, he says, there’s “no price too great to pay for freedom.”
With those words, playwright Jennifer Petticolas is hoping to shed some light on what she calls, in the play, “the secret of black folks’ anger” about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement.
“I Know the Secret,” a dinner show that starts Saturday night at the Holiday Inn Select downtown, toggles back and forth between Tappe’s talk show and vignettes about important moments in black history “from slavery right up through (to right now),” Petticolas says.
Tappe’s second guest is First Lady Michelle Obama (played by Claudia Pollard), who is interrupted by a white audience member after she says her husband’s presidential run was the first time that she was proud of her country (the real Obama made a similar statement during a 2008 rally, but later clarified that she meant she was proud of how Americans were engaging in the political process).
The host brings the man up on the stage and “he’s carried through the history of African Americans,” Petticolas says.
Some of the vignettes focus on the stories of people like Medgar Evers, a Civil Rights activist who was assassinated in 1963; Andrew Goodman, another activist who was killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan; and Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Mississippi boy who was murdered after whistling at a white woman.
There’s an interlude called “The Ones,” in which famous black leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois look down on Earth and have a conversation.
“I took pieces of their speeches and threaded them together to make a conversation,” Petticolas says.
She also covers the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case and the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that left four little girls dead.
“Black history is not pretty history,” Petticolas says. “Its not pleasant at all. It’s a story people, both black and white, feel uncomfortable (about). But until we talk about it … we’re not going to change things.”
The shows are scheduled for 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Doors open for dinner at 1 and 6 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $10 for the play and an additional $12 for the dinner buffet. They can be purchased online at www.Lynchburg
Tickets.com or at the door.
For more information, call (434) 528-2500.
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