Patience Cooper comes home
Boston theatre group "Up You Mighty Race" stages story of murder, false conviction and racial unrest on Nantucket
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
In the 19th century, the most famous murder trial on Nantucket centered on Patience Cooper, a free, educated and employed black woman who lived on Nantucket during a period of racial unrest, when Quakers and other social progressives fought to integrate Nantucket schools while another faction surged against it. (Eunice Ross, the black student at the heart of the integration struggle - which led to the first education-related civil rights legislation on the books in America - was a friend of Cooper.)

It was a man in the latter column, Nathaniel Fitzgerald, who said he had been privy, while sitting by the bedside of a comatose woman who had been attacked, to witness her wake one last time and name Patience Cooper as her attacker and then die.

This is the story that playwright, attorney and professor Robert Johnson dramatized in his script "Patience of Nantucket," which comes to Nantucket this week after opening last year at the Boston Center for the Arts to three weeks of sold out shows and quite positive reviews. The Boston Globe reviewer called the play "masterful," and the Boston Herald stated, "Johnson's script makes Patience so real, and though 150 years have passed, he's worked in striking contemporary political parallels."

"We made a decision, after the show closed in Boston, that Nantucket would be the next natural place to take it," said Johnson, who chairs the Africana Studies Department at UMass Boston and whose next play, "Mother G," premieres in 2008 at the African-American Theatre in Boston (the same theatre in which "Patience" debuted).

"Patience was from here. To resurrect her in her home - so people see her and feel her - she comes alive again. It brings the buildings alive, and it brings alive the people who lived in that time," he said.

It's a story that anyone who claims to know Nantucket history should know; the historically accurate characters and situations surrounding it are the stuff of Nantucket's struggle to walk on the right side of racial issues.

Up You Mighty Race, a Bostonbased theatre company that focuses on the African-American experience, staged "Patience of Nantucket" in Boston and is bringing it back to Nantucket. Beforehand, the play's cast and crew visited Nantucket's African Meeting House for an extended lecture on Nantucket's African- American history, and walked to sites specific to the real-life events in the play.

The play's director, Akiba Abaka, said that bringing the play to Nantucket as a way of saying 'Thank You' to the island that keeps the door to its history unlocked at all times.

"I feel like I'm Christmas shopping for Nantucket, trying to make a special package to give to it as a gift. That's how I feel as a producer and a director, that we are giving back the island that gave us so much," she said.

Johnson was coordinating the James Bradford Ames Fellowship program (founded by Adele Ames) on Nantucket for the University of Massachusetts when he first learned of Cooper, via an article in a local publication. "But it wasn't a scholarly article," he said. "So I decided that I would write the first scholarly article on Patience Cooper."

In 2004, Johnson edited "Nantucket's People of Color," an anthology of articles written by the James Bradford Ames fellows. Already a prolific historical playwright (his works include "Freedom's Journeyman," co-written with Amy Merrill, " and "Sugar Hill"), Johnson decided to dramatize Patience Cooper's story and, in so doing, offer educational insight into the history of Nantucket's African-American and islander community.

Since its creation, the play has had a solid string of success, including a performance, at the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston Salem, N.C. two years ago.

When asked about addressing issues of race in the story, Johnson said plainly that he wished only to give an accurate historical rendering of Cooper's life and surroundings.

"I wanted to make sure I was clear on historical record before I dealt with creative," said the playwright, who did take some poetic (and professional) license with the courtroom script, as little was left of the actual transcript of the judge's proceedings.

Johnson added that the script does not espouse a black-and-white divide.

"The play is not white versus black. It's a human play. Patience's church supported her. Rev. Crawford and the Quakers supported her. The play is about the human spirit coming together to work for the common good in these seemingly overwhelming aspects of life," Johnson said. "History is what it is. I write historical plays so the history can become accessible to local people. Within two hours, you're taken on a historical journey, and people come away moved, educated and challenged. And so by understanding this history, it makes us better people and better Americans."

One of the first people to admit not knowing much about Nantucket's racial history before the play is Pamela Lambert, the actor playing Patience Cooper.

"I had no idea that Nantucket's was the first integrated school in the United States," said Lambert, who added that Abaka made her "throw away all the talk and research I normally require and find the emotion and the turmoil and be led."

Abaka said it is the emotion in the story, in addition to its historically edifying quality, that she appreciates so much. During the play's second act, Cooper "falls apart," in Johnson's words, and the story relates not only Cooper's struggle to maintain her innocence, but also her sanity.

"Patience embodies suffering and accomplishment - two aspects of black experience in America," Abaka said. "She was not a slave; she was educated. She was active in her community. At the same time, this horrible event occurred, and she goes down as the murderer of Phoebe Fuller, and that to me symbolizes the experiences of black people in America. And it's important to me, as a director, to get into the pain she's in and deliver the play."

However, the play is not a gothic tale of madness in a women's prison, the director maintained.

"You don't leave feeling depressed," Abaka said. "You're stirred up, but it doesn't take you down."

When: Thurs. - Sat., July 5-14,

8 p.m.; Sun., July 15, 4 p.m.

Where: First Congregational

Church, (Bennett Hall),

62 Centre St.

Cost: $25; $15 students/seniors;

$5 off adult full price for groups of 10 or more. Purchase tickets at www.capetix.com or call

(866) 811-4111. I