SHADOW, a FREE Festival of Concert Readings Celebrating Black History 2/20-23 (NYC)

To learn more about the plays, please click here.

Calvin Ramsey wins AAPEX Book Award for 2012 for RUTH AND THE GREEN BOOK

Calvin Ramsey

AAPEX is proud to announce that Atlanta playwright Calvin Ramsey's children's picture book Ruth and the Green Book, has won our AAPEX Book Award for 2012. Stunningly illustrated by Floyd Cooper, it follows

elementary school-aged Ruth on her first vacation in the early 1950's from Chicago to her grandmother's house in Alabama through a very segregated America. The journey exposes her to the ugly Jim Crow laws that made it nearly impossible for black people to travel freely through their own country. Encountering one "Whites Only" establishment after another, it's not until they stop at a friendly Esso service station (one of the few franchises at that time that allowed African American ownership) on the Georgia border that they learn of "The Green Book." Originally written by Victor H. Green in 1936 (and used through 1964), "The Negro Motorist Green Book" was a pamphlet that listed businesses and homes that would serve African Americans as they traveled around the country. Although Ruth's eyes have been firmly opened to the mean-spirited reality of her world, in the end Grandma saves the day with a loving, warm, never-to-be-forgotten reception. This book is a wonderful companion to Ramsey's play The Green Book and a great way of introducing children through elegant prose and magnificent art to a nearly forgotten period in African American history. No matter what your color or age, AAPEX highly recommends it to everyone. To buy the book on Amazon.com, please click the post's title.

Atlanta Playwright Calvin Ramsey Wins AAPEX New Voice 2011 Award

Calvin Ramsey

The African American Playwrights' Exchange is pleased to recognize Atlanta based playwright and author Calvin Ramsey as AAPEX's New Voice of 2011. This recognition goes to Calvin for the outstanding job he has done of parlaying his research on The Negro Motorists Green Book into successes on two fronts - a drama, THE GREEN BOOK, which opens at Atlanta's Theatrical Outfit on August 17th - and an award winning children's book, RUTH AND THE GREEN BOOK, which has received a bronze medal in the Childrens' Picture Book category of the ForeWord 2011 Book of the Year Awards. In addition to his accomplishments as a writer, Calvin is also a significant force in the Atlanta theatre community, as indicated by the numerous conversations I have had with actors and other artists who have worked with him over the years - and the upcoming run of THE GREEN BOOK will surely shine a light on the amazing work being done in theatre in what is possibly the most fascinating city in the United States. Come to Atlanta and Go to the Theatre

Jaz Dorsey

Dramaturg AAPEX

AAPEX Interview: Calvin Ramsey and THE GREEN BOOK

A HISTORY LESSON 

or Google This!

                                                   
For me, AAPEX (The African American Playwrights Exchange) has been a history lesson rooted deep in what historical philosophers call "revisionism." Since founding this network on January 1, 2007, I have been completely reeducated in American history by playwrights and the research they have done to bring the world a greater knowledge of the African American contribution to literature, journalism, business and the arts. From Phillis Wheatley to Hannah Elias to Madam C J Walker & Ida B. Wells to Amelita Boynton Robinson to Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday, I have found a new country.

The newest discovery to come on my radar - thanks to Atlanta Playwright CALVIN RAMSEY - is an amazing publication that dates from 1936- 1964 - The Negro Motorists Green Book - a guidebook for safe and comfortable traveling during the era of segregation.

If you google The Green Book, the first entry you will find is a facsimile of the 1949 edition.

If you keep on checking out entries, you will find again and again references to Ramsey and his play - THE GREEN BOOK - including a NY Times article about the staged reading of the play at Washington, D. C.'s Lincoln Theatre a couple of years back.

And if you can make it to Atlanta on August 17th, you can join the gala audience when THE GREEN BOOK  opens at Atlanta's Theatrical Outfit.

I asked Mr. Ramsey to tell us something about himself and the journey to his play. This is what he had to say:

"My oldest brother was very involved in musical theatre and exposed me at an early age about the magic of theatre and the arts.

I always wanted to write from the age of six.   I knew that one day that I would write.

I have lived in California, Martha's Vineyard,  NYC, St. Croix and St.John of the Virgin Islands and now Atlanta. I was born in Baltimore Maryland and reared in Roxboro North Carolina. I had a rural and and urban upbringing spending nine years in both places. As I traveled, I observed and read a lot  - as Langston Hughes wrote, I wondered and wandered. My travels and different jobs helped season me as a writer. I drove cabs, bartended, bell hopped, farmed, sold advertising and insurance and painted houses.

The Green Book came into my life through little Tony,  a son of two of my friends who died in a traffic accident.  Little Tony's grandfather came down from NYC to attend the funeral and this was his first time in the deep south. He mentioned that he was looking for a Green Book.  I ASKED HIM WHAT WAS A GREEN BOOK AND FROM THERE I WAS ON MY WAY WITH MY RESEARCH. I dedicated my children's book "Ruth and the Green Book" to Little Tony and his family.

Atlanta as a theatre town has been very good to me; everyone's experience is different. I think its a good town for developing new work but a bit of a challenge of getting new work mounted."

Don't miss Calvin Ramsey's THE GREEN BOOK 

at 

The Theatrical Outfit.
Please click the post's title to visit the website.

Come to Atlanta and Go to the Theatre!

Jaz Dorsey
Dramaturg
The African American Playwrights Exchange
www.africanamericanplaywrightsexchange.blogspot.com

AAPEX Playwright banned in Atlanta

Something we missed last summer:

Atlanta Journal Constitution Main Edition

Monday, 7/27/2009

　

Headline: No ban on author's success

Plug pulled on play about KKK rallies in Stone Mountain.

Jeffry Scott / Staff

　

Four summers ago Atlanta playwright Calvin Ramsey did what he does as a playwright. He took the history of race relations between blacks and whites in America and gave them a stir to make people remember things they'd just as soon forget. His play, Shermantown --- Baseball, Apple Pie, and the Klan, was about Ku Klux Klan rallies staged every Labor Day for decades, with burning crosses and fiery oratory booming over loudspeakers, in a pasture in the town of Stone Mountain. The Stone Mountain theater that had agreed to stage Ramsey's reading of the play, ART Station, pulled out at the last second because theater director David Thomas said he feared it would disrupt race relations in the town, which has a population that is 70 percent black. Thomas said a monologue in the play was "not only racy, it's inciting and slanderous about Jews and Catholics." Ramsey countered that the play was historically accurate and the monologue no more provocative than the hate-filled speeches that went on, without censor, every year at the event until the rallies stopped in the early 1990s.

The theater didn't back down, so Ramsey ended up reading "Shermantown" at a local church.

These days the 59-year-old former insurance salesman still lives in Atlanta and is plugging away and enjoying growing success as a playwright and author.

And he's still plying the complexities of black and white relations he explored in earlier plays The Green Book, Canada Lee and Bricktop, which examined the plight of blacks in America before integration.

He's been offered a movie option on The Green Book, a play based on the guide black travelers used in the days of segregation to find lodgings and restaurants that would accept blacks, but he hasn't signed because he wants to keep editorial control.

"I don't want to make a deal just to make a deal, " Ramsey said in an interview last week at a downtown coffee shop.

He's sold a couple of children's books yet to be published. His play about J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor who performed experimental gynecological surgeries on black slave women on plantations in the 1840s, Damaged Virtues: A Cry From Within, is tentatively scheduled for production in February at La MaMa E.T.C., an experimental theater in New York.

"His story is a fascinating one, " said Ramsey, who first learned about Sims a couple of years ago. "He performed these experiments, doing surgery on one woman 34 times, and through the techniques he developed he became known as 'The Father of Gynecology.' "

In the play the three slave woman Sims experimented on, and later wrote about, Lucy, Betsey and Anarcha, come back from the dead "to tell their side of the story."

The play is set in Central Park in New York, where a statue of Sims now stands, and that statue comes to life in Ramsey's play so the doctor can "defend himself."