Linda Frye Burnham - Swamp Gravy

Swappin' Lies in Miller County: The Story of Swamp Gravy

By Linda Frye Burnham

I'm probably not supposed to tell this, but I spent most of the closing night of "Swamp Gravy" drinking wine out of the trunk of somebody's car outside the Cotton Hall in Colquitt, Georgia. We were out there for hours, popping the trunk lid and pouring champagne into plastic glasses on the sly.
It wasn't the only party in Colquitt. Periodically we joined the crowd inside the big cotton warehouse where half the town was whooping it up, taking pictures and celebrating the final spring performance of a play none of us would ever forget. But "the kids are in there," somebody told me. And I guess you don't drink champagne in front of the kids in Miller County.
So we stood under the streetlight and perched against the cars and sat on the curbstones and leaned on the building and just talked till we couldn't talk any more. The subject was too fascinating to put down. We were talking theory out there. Community performance theory. Me and the director and the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker. Finally the kids went home and we went into the warehouse to lounge on the set and contemplate what had happened there.
Stages loomed all over the space: on a huge loading dock, on the back of a flatbed truck, on several small platforms like scaffolds or pulpits. An old John Deere tractor sat proudly resurrected at the top of a flight of stairs. A few theater lights threw a soft glow over the hanging quilts and the oak chips on the floor. The audience, now gone, had packed the bleachers interspersed among the various stages, and the overflow had stood on the floor, mingling with the actors who moved among them. To the back of the warehouse rested a quilting loom where earlier that night a ring of women sat sewing. The walls were lined with concession areas and exhibits telling of the history and the labor of this community: moonshine stills, sugar cane vats, peanuts and cotton, mayhaw jelly.
Now the actors stood in the afterglow and looked deeply into the scene, calling up the feelings that had coursed through this space over the three years it took to draw the energy together and make this play happen.
"I couldn't have wrote down all the emotions on a single piece of paper," somebody told me that night.
These South Georgia people's pride of ownership was obvious--a remarkable outcome considering the play's unconventional staging, its often tough subject matter and its deeply personal content. Remarkable too, considering the fact that it sprang from an idea invented by an outsider--a Ph.D. from Chicago named Richard Owen Geer. It is the intersection of Geer with the people of Colquitt, and the evolution of the people, the director, the play and the town that I wish to examine here.
Colquitt is a small town, (pop. 2,000) the seat of Miller County (6,000) in deep southwest Georgia. The county was a wilderness area in 1865 when it was settled by pioneers who, according to The History of Miller County 1856-1976, "endured hardships and lived the most primitive lives; made a way when there was no way; learned through hard work, self-reliance, courage, thrift and faith in God....They were poor, but a more honorable generation the world has never known. They were not perfect; they were often hard-drinking, always hard-working and brave."
The culture of Miller County is still rural, with a population that is, like so many other rural counties, dwindling due to the migration of young people to the cities. While Colquitt was certainly no ghost town in the early '90s, everyone could agree it needed something to re-energize the community's pride and economy. Joy Jinks of the Colquitt/Miller Arts Council and a consultant in rural development, felt a historical pageant could provide an infusion of cultural energy, involve the county folks and attract visitors from elsewhere. With that in mind, in 1991 Jinks attended a creativity workshop in the north where she met Richard Geer, then completing a doctorate in performance studies at Northwestern. Jinks related her idea and Geer got excited. Over many hours of discussion, they decided to work together develop a play in Colquitt around the personal history of the town. They didn't know then how much convincing, inveigling, fundraising and mediation it would take, nor did they dream of the artistic success they would achieve. Three years later, a cast of 70 Colquitt and Miller County citizens, all nonactors, was playing to sold-out crowds from all over the region. "Swamp Gravy" had been officially recognized by the state legislature as Georgia's "folk-life play," and it had been named part of the 1994 Cultural Olympiad. It is generally agreed that "Swamp Gravy" put Colquitt on the map.
Even more interesting, while "Swamp Gravy" measures up to the best of current avant-garde art and Geer based his doctoral dissertation on it, it is also a play that provokes fierce pride in the participants and sits well with the county folk and even pleases the local critics ("It is merely the most compelling experience I have ever had in the theater," wrote Editor Ed Corson in the Macon Telegraph. "It was wonderful to see a community come together--black, white, young, old, rich, poor--and create a performance that is not only healing but compelling, authoritative, confident theater.") In short, it satisfied just about everybody, including Richard Geer.
"I had the privilege of facilitating a semi-segregated county of 6,000 in the agon of gathering its oral histories," says Geer in reflection, "watching those become a racially integrated play, and helping with the design and construction of a vast, site-specific performing space."
"Swamp Gravy" is a called a play, but its motto comes closer to the truth: "Northerners tell stories and call it therapy. Southerners tell stories and call it swappin' lies" (from the brochure). At its heart is intimate storytelling. Light years beyond the traditional southern historical drama, "Swamp Gravy" is a musical storytelling extravaganza. The title refers to a local recipe for a stew, a kind of improvised soup made of "whatever is at hand." Built from the oral histories of the people of Miller County, it sports the full-length stories of a handful of people and the sayings, phrases and diction of literally hundreds of people. It blends folk remedies, ghost stories, jokes, well known scandals and deeply held secrets. It contains births, deaths, dressing up, dressing down, mother love, family violence and a secret wedding in the woods. It's got folk tunes, singalongs and the blues.
The play operates on two distinct levels, a strategy of "historical parallelism," or "dressing current problems in old clothes," according to Geer. Performed in period 19th Century costume, it contains much material that, in a contemporary frame, might be problematic, politically too sensitive. At historical remove, these themes resonate across time, deep rooted in the particular character of the region. Still, stories that make entertaining drama to an outsider are the real stuff of local life, and they tug heavily at the heartstrings of the Colquitt native. The night I saw it, a scene remembering the dead brought tears from a man in his 50s sitting near me.
"Swamp Gravy" is a good example of a work that blurs the definition of ownership. Overall the performance is the product of the direct efforts of 400 people, and captured the indirect involvement and attention of everybody in Colquitt. ("We're all in `Swamp Gravy'," said a local merchant.) In talking with cast members, it is clear that the play belongs to them, not to Geer or the playwright, Jo Carson. They are in control of the social and artistic life of the drama. They will tour it and they will answer requests to assist nearby towns in developing their own plays.
Tennessee playwright Jo Carson is credited with "adapting" the script. Her primary contribution was the organizing of the material and the selecting of language from people's memories. Working with thousands of pages of transcripts from oral histories gathered by 150 Miller Countians, Carson combed the stories for themes, and her eye picked out individual lines full of local flavor. Though a written script exists, the piece I saw on stage was no longer the script Carson wrote. The script is massaged every time it is rehearsed. In transit back and forth from Chicago, Geer was in town for the first and last performances of the 11-night spring run and found much of it completely changed by the cast.
The play will go on changing as long as it is performed. Every fall and spring new material will be added and other material pared away (It is sure to respond to the disastrous south Georgia flood of 1994, which devastated nearby Americus and Bainbridge.) In this way, the play will remain the current voice of the community, a forum where issues can be examined, history recorded and avenues explored. Geer sees this quality as primary to the idea of "community performance," a phrase he says is "meant to signal a relationship between a region (or a tradition) and its theater." The continuation of the play, he says, is actually the continuation of a process, an animation of the community, "which, theoretically, will never be finished." It is the exact character of this process that is of fundamental importance to artists and communities everywhere.
All over the country artists are searching for strategies to achieve social goals with their art work. Troubled by the chaos, violence and wasted energy rampant in late 20th Century culture, they are coming out of their studios and into their communities, attempting to use their skills to transform destruction and social entropy with creativity.
Richard Geer's life as an artist has become subsumed by this mission. Observing the energy emanating from cultural groups of all kinds, looking at the powerful cohesion at work in group activities from religious services to baseball games to rock concerts, he posited that there is a process at work among humans that, if harnessed, can generate healthful interaction. He called this process "phylopoiesis," and, though he has completed 20 years of theater directing and advanced studies of community theater all over the world, he found little in current theory to satisfy him.
"Phylopoiesis means community formation," he says, "--activities that redirect aggression, improve communication and bond groups. Without it cultures could not exist. Though we practice it every day, we understand little about phylopoiesis as a global concept. To write about it I had to invent a word."
"What if," Geer wrote in an essay, "a single activity could energize a school like a championship football game, develop warmth like a teacher reading stories to her class, create relationships between participants like a wilderness experience, empower participants with the confidence of a starring actor, institute critical dialogue between all school participants like a great teacher, and engender a degree of loyalty that gang members feels toward one another? For that to happen, communities would need to evolve creative, intentional phylopoiesis instead of wasting their energies fighting destructive ones." In the case of Colquitt, Geer gives this description of the objective of "Swamp Gravy": to create "an intentional phylopoiesis that would transform racism, sexism, ageism and xenophobia and tap into new energies in the community."
With that objective in mind, Geer took very seriously the role that each person would play in the process, including himself. As more and more artists commit to community projects, their work is raising critical questions about the role of the artist, about the exact location of the artistic act in these projects. Collaboration is the key in this work. For these artists the challenges of helping to organize a community project are enormous, and different each time. Sometime it is even more challenging to find their own roles in the process, which may change as it progresses, and continue to change even after it ends.
Geer, nominally the director, calls himself a community performance worker, and in another age and country he might have been called a cultural animateur. As I have spoken with him over the past year, he had tended to remove himself further and further from credit for the existence of "Swamp Gravy."
"All I bring is a useless stone," he says, referring to a folk tale called "Stone Soup," about a recipe for making something out of what appears to be scarcity. "I bring the stone and everybody else gets into the business of making soup. They bring the salt and the carrots and all the other ingredients." Geer's most apparent contribution was the imaginative staging that moved the cast through the audience, had them telling stories simultaneously, turned a beauty-parlor scene into a dance, skillfully and delicately showcased racial issues, folded the observer into the history and relationships of the town. ("You never knew when the person next to you would burst out singing," said one audience member.)
But he delights in telling tales of how his craft evolved through the making of "Swamp Gravy."
"I remember the first time I ever directed a scene," he says. "It was a scene from Midsummer Night's Dream where the two young lovers meet, and I thought I was so ready. I choreographed every single movement that those two people did, down to the cock of an eyebrow, and it was pure auteur directing. Not that it was great, but it was very overdirected. And what I've been doing ever since then as a director is taking my own hands further and further off the piece to try to encourage the people themselves, so that I become an editor more than a creator. People always express more profoundly the stuff they truly know, that comes out of them, rather than me giving them the gesture. And this first scene was just two people that I directed, and in a way this last play is directing a whole town. But when I was directing those two people I was totally controlling what they were doing, as much as I possibly could, and if I could have controlled it more I would have. Here at the other end I exerted only very weak forces over the field of this choreography. My job is to help performers discover the performance they already possess.
"With a good text and a sensitive and culturally authentic person," he goes on, "there is little to do but encourage, ask good questions and coach technique. Diction, blocking, stage deportment and the playing of laughs are the things I stress most often. I don't alter a performer's national diction unless it is incomprehensible to other native speakers, and this is rare." He tells of working with Jakie, a factory worker who had to tell the emotionally demanding story of an abused wife. "Her belief in my theater expertise helped alleviate her fears, but I won her trust, she told me, by believing in her, by finding the good and praising it."
Geer recounts numerous instances of the cast taking the directing out of his hands, giving each other notes, taking the initiative to make adjustments to the scene when a cast member is suddenly missing.
"What seems to work," he says, "is to create a notion that somehow is interesting to the community of how they might dance together. Then just remind them of the music or give them a nudge or invite them out onto the floor. My growth as a director has been about nondirecting. My private stories of directing end up being about taking my hands off it. It's when the cast shuts the curtain and says, Go away, we'll work on this scene without you. It's this: that I go away and the play is much stronger when I come back again, and I wasn't there. They don't need me. The fact that they want this thing to go on, I believe that's directing. If you took me out of the thing it would be different, and I know that. And yet I'm not controlling it."
This hands-off claim is not false modesty. It is common sense, especially with difficult material that might threaten the community beyond its endurance. Geer claims that it is the cast and not he who know what to do and how far to take it.
"The participants are the ones qualified to ratchet up or down the intensity of confrontation," says Geer. "They understand intuitively how to tune the performance so it speaks effectively to the community, criticizing within a context of support. As an outsider I cannot know what level of confrontation is appropriate. My training in the theater has been to tell it like it is, and let the chips fall where they may. Such naive, self-righteous, culturally inappropriate excess would destroy everything we have worked to begin."
More than practical, this approach is also good phylopoeisis. The culturally diverse cast needed a strong bond to work together and cross the barriers that history had set up for them. The procession toward that bond is complex and will take time.
"It is wise to proceed gently," says Geer, "because a community that hurts itself will break off the process. `Swamp Gravy Sketches' [an early version presented in 1992] contained little that was critical; fifteen months later, `Swamp Gravy' faces issues more directly; stories being gathered now will result in future, more controversial performances."
The powerful community experience has led, Geer believes, to an altered community identity: Colquitt, he says, is evolving a more intelligent, compassionate, playful, pleasure-taking community organism. The pleasure of ensemble acting and making decisions as a unit, and the joy of intimacy in sharing each other's stories will, he thinks, lead to exploration of more painful history together.
"Take, for instance, the pleasure the cast already takes in performing racial integration. In the South integration came at gunpoint, and no one, white or black, likes to be forced to do something, especially by outsiders. The cast of `Swamp Gravy', by contrast, is choosing integration. Along the way it is exploding the negative stereotypes of rural, racist Southern towns."
But these states of bonding and ensemble were hard-won.
The community voiced skepticism, fear, even outrage at various points of the process and more than once Geer thought he was done for.
He rode into town with Joy Jinks, bringing his theories of "bettering" the community, and received numerous messages that the community wasn't looking for an outsider to make judgments about it or to improve its condition. The project description was soon redirected toward a "celebration of the community's heritage," but by then Geer had betrayed himself as an avant-garde experimenter.
Through different spokespersons, community members told of their concerns. Some people spoke of Miller County as a closed community, wary of outsiders and protective of their turf. For some there was a reluctance to bring Southern history to light and doubt that that past could ever be seen as something to celebrate. Many worried about the use of their personal material, that it not be presented in a way that was "weird," and that they not be cast in a bad light. Some were uncomfortable with the "grandiose design" and the "nebulous aspects" of the script and the production. An African-American participant explained the hesitancy of people from her community to get involved in what was seen as white activity, a basic distrust of mixing with white people. More than once Geer was warned of dire consequences if there was any "race mixing" between the sexes, on or off stage. "You are opening up a can of worms if you take the race thing too far," someone told him. Because he was so acutely aware of these fears, Geer is grateful to those of both races who committed early, for it was their endorsement that got the ball rolling.
But in late 1992 something disastrous happened. It looked like things were doomed, and the issue revolved around Geer and his role in the proceedings. Ten days before "Swamp Gravy Sketches," an early production of parts of the piece, Geer did something most actors are used to witnessing: he threw a classic director's tantrum. Only half the cast had turned up for rehearsal and Geer was furious. He flew into a rage, finishing with "the F-- word" at top decibels. In the atmosphere surrounding "Swamp Gravy," which is subtitled "acting together for a better community," this behavior was clearly unacceptable. Not only was his language offensive, losing one's temper is not done in Colquitt. Even more distressing, while he had gone out of his way to empower the cast, this intimidating tantrum betrayed a fundamentally hierarchical attitude,
"I turned around and saw everybody streaming out the doors," says Geer now, still astonished. "They told me they couldn't work with me and three of the men threatened to beat me up if I didn't get out of town!" In desperation, Geer tried apologizing to individuals, but to no avail. Finally he appealed to the local minister, who called a meeting and explained to the cast that Geer was seeking forgiveness, and they had to give it to him or they couldn't call themselves Christians. After further discussion, they voted to forgive him and go on with the piece. Geer stayed and everyone is more than glad he did, but the auteur in him left town for good.
The incident taught him, among other things, that the power of a community performance must be in the hands of the ensemble, not the director. He learned that it was impossible to manipulate the community in a direction it did not want to take. The outsider "performance expert" who uses strategies of status shifting and subversiveness, grabbing the power and centering it in himself, will be swiftly ejected by the community, along with his ideas. This, he says, explains why artists have found themselves marginalized the world over. However, once the power is turned over to the group, it is difficult for the group to abandon it. Thus, Geer learned to swallow pride, submit to the will of the community and change his mind about how performance is made.
In another instance, Geer called in a community member who had been only peripherally involved and asked him to view a rehearsal and give notes to the cast. His comments were extremely critical, and cast members later called the stage manager, revealing a surprising amount of anger and pain. The incident seemed to be doing a great deal of harm, and Geer turned to a cast member, Charlotte Phillips, for an answer. Her analysis was that the cast, even though they worked together, did not really know each other intimately enough, did not feel supported by one another and were out of touch. "To get in touch," she said, "we need to touch." Geer asked her to facilitate it.
That night Phillips brought food for 70 and suggested they just "let them eat" (a kind of communion, perhaps). Then she got everyone into a circle and read them a heartfelt two-page statement about how important they were, spoke to their pain and sacrifice, and gave them her love. After this reading, many were in tears. Then she asked everybody to hug their neighbors and tell them how important they were in the plan.
"That was our first major joyful, tearful touching of one another," says Geer, "and now this group at the drop of a hat will start hugging each other, even the men."
The closing cast party for "Swamp Gravy" was a real love-fest, with members honoring each other in the tenderest of ways. Gayle Grimsley, an outstanding African-American singer, thanked Richard Geer and the entire cast by singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings." Cast members told me barriers of class and race had been brought down and Colquitt would never be the same.
"Swamp Gravy" is presented by the Colquitt/Miller Arts Council, adapted for the stage by Jo Carson, directed by Dr. Richard Owen Geer, with original music by Karen Smith Kimbrel (melody and lyrics) and Steve Hacker (music and arrangment), set design by Joe Varga, lighitng design by Brackley Frayer, costume supervision by Colleen Muscha and stage managemet by Lisa Davis. The program lists 61 cast members, 21 technical crew members (plus Boy Scout Troop #85), and 170 story tellers and gatherers, plus hundreds of donors and providers of services that merited special thanks. "Swamp Gravy" was funded in part by the Georgia Council for the Arts. Performances take place in Colquitt's Cotton Hall, a warehouse building recently presented to the company by a generous donor. For "Swamp Gravy" information call (912) 758-5450.

Copyright 1995, Linda Frye Burnham — All Rights Reserved
This essay may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of the author.
"Swappin' Lies in Miller County" first appeared in Atlanta's Art Papers, 1994.

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