Market House Theatre of Paducah presented the world premiere of Riot: Asbury Park by Amanda Haan on Thursday, November 11th. The theatre presents its final performances of the show this weekend. Executive director Michael Cochran speaks to Tracy Ross about the play and its upcoming performances.
After sending out a call to Kentucky Playwrights for scripts that had never been produced, Market House Theatre received Riot: Asbury Park from Amanda Haan. "When I read it, I thought this is so timely with everything that has happened in the past year," Cochran begins. "The conversation in [the play] is a conversation still relevant today."
Haan based the play around a 1971 article from Look magazine, which documented the Asbury Park riots in July 1970. "All the characters in it, all the research she did, is based on the real people and the real conversations that went on in a room of people called together to stop the riot," Cochran says.
Haan pulled the exact dialogue from the Look article for Riot. She also reached out to the people featured in the article to confirm that the conversations were as historically accurate as possible. Holly VanLeuven, now 86 years old, was one of the original facilitators of the Black-white conflicts. VanLeuven flew to Paducah to watch Riot on opening weekend.
Since Riot centers so much around opposing walks of life, Cochran was careful to keep the cast as diverse as possible, both in terms of race and age. "It is a play that really starts out with people not being able to listen to each other," he explains. "By the end of it, you find them working together to resolve the problems that were happening in the 1970 riot."
"There's a lot of tension that starts the show. As it starts, that anger bubbles up to the surface. They're not listening to each other. As the play goes on, the facilitator does some exercises to help them understand how they're not hearing each other. People need to feel like they're understood, that what they said got heard. You're not always going to find agreement with that. But people can work together as long as they hear each other out," Cochran says.
Cochran says Riot—and theatre in general—does an excellent job of encouraging audiences to find a middle ground. "My goal is that [Riot] is an even-handed presentation. It doesn't try to take on one side or the other. It just presents what happened in that room and how they resolved that."
"If we get that across to an audience, it's a powerful thing," he continues. "And being in the theatre gives you that sense of being in the room where it happened. It's a powerful piece that I think will resonate for a long time and have a lot of community discussion about it."
Market House Theatre presents Riot: Asbury Park on Thursday, November 18th, Friday, November 19th, at 7 pm; Saturday, November 20th at 2:30 and 7 pm; and Sunday, November 21st at 2:30 pm.
Tickets are available online or by calling the box office at 270-444-6828. November 18th and 19th's performances are also available on Broadway on Demand.
For more information on Market House Theatre, visit its website.
