“Exhibit” is the title of actress and playwright Regina Taylor’s one-woman play. The character she created and portrayed for “Exhibit” is an artist by the name of Iris. “Iris is putting her life on display, on exhibit,” Regina tells us. “But it’s also an indictment of this history that keeps circling back around. Just when you think you’ve gotten over it, there it is again. So, you can smell it coming and know you’re in for some hard, rough times. Each time, we have made it through. We can continue to make it through. In the face of being obliterated, we rise out of ashes—again and again and again. How do we do that? Especially in terms of each generation having to fight for it. How does this generation deal with it if they don’t know where they come from?”
Regina’s life, her many, many roles, all of her experiences in film, in TV, in theater, on the stage, acting, writing, directing, and producing; all of these experiences and life prepared her for “Exhibit.”
She was thrust into the civil rights experience at a very young age. Born in Dallas, Texas, her parents briefly moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma, when she was twelve years old. There, she integrated Muskogee’s all-white high school as their first African American student. Was it a coincidence, or was it just meant to be that her first acting role was in a made-for-TV movie, “Crisis at Central High,” in which she portrayed Minijean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine, who integrated Little Rock, Arkansas’ all-white high school.
At the time she was discovered for that role, being an actress was not in her plans. “I was a writer; I had been writing all my life,” she says. But to enhance her writing, she was taking an acting one-on-one class in the Arts Building at Southern Methodist University. Henry Fonda was visiting the school for a play he was doing there that was going to be broadcast live. “I was a huge fan,” Regina recalls.
“I started following him down the hall, too shy to say hello. Somebody stopped me stalking Henry Fonda and said, ‘Who are you? Are you an actor?’” Of course, Regina said yes, and so he invited her to an audition happening that weekend. Being a little suspicious of the audition venue – off the freeway at Motel 6 – as she put it, “I’m not a fool, ” she took her big cousin with her. “I made up a fake resume,” she says, “and I got the job.” Her performance in that film won her the praise of New York film critic, John O’Connor.
Although she is still very much a writer, that chance audition and that made-for-TV movie, propelled her into an award winning career as an actress, playwright, director and producer.
The ground-breaking series, “I’ll Fly Away,” in which she portrayed Lily Harper, a maid in the segregated South who starts riding on the bus as a freedom rider, or as a protester, was another civil rights experience. “You watch this woman grow,” she says, “You watch her social consciousness grow as she becomes part of the movement.” Regina recounts how that series made her more aware of how images work in the industry. How images can move people, raise people’s consciousness, perhaps stir people to move in different directions. “To be involved. To know their history. To gain ground in terms of how we see each other and how we interact and how we grow as individuals and as a country,” she says, “The impact of the arts and social justice has always been intertwined, and I am so proud to have the luck, to have the grace to be involved in some shows that express that.”
Besides civil rights, Regina’s work has also expressed Black culture. She relates how she became involved in the award-winning play which she created and directed called “Crowns.” “‘Crowns’ was a coffee table by Cunningham and Marbury,” she tells us, “One day, Emily Mann, the artistic director of the McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey, called and invited me to take a look at the book and see if I wanted to adapt it as a play.” Regina was in Dallas with her mother when she received the book. “I was telling my mom about it, and she started walking me through her closet. She owned a lot of hats, and each hat had a story—about a wedding, a funeral, a baptism—and as she walked me through these memories of her life, I knew that was what the piece should be about, and I started weaving these stories about our history, our celebrations, the traditions of African American women and their hats. How each hat expresses the individual and how we pass these stories on.”
The idea for “Exhibit” came out of an interview. “The interviewer was asking me about the first things I did, and we were talking about ‘Crisis at Central High’ and the Little Rock 9, and this person asked me what my experiences were growing up in America, related to race. I told her that I integrated a school in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and usually that conversation doesn’t go any further, but this time it did, and she asked me how old was I when I integrated that school. I suddenly realized I thought I knew, but I actually couldn’t remember how old I was, and my mother had passed by then and I was no longer connected to anyone in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And I realized that there were some things that were blacked out in terms of my memories as a child having to do with integrating that school.” So, Regina tells us, she reached out to Facebook. “I reached out to someone I recalled as one of my best friends in Muskogee, and she immediately responded. And we’ve been talking ever since.” Regina’s childhood friend had similar experiences. “Along the way, we just don’t talk about it,” she says, “Whatever happened in the past, we soldier on, we go through, and we keep moving. So, I started writing this play, “Exhibit,” that has to do with my experiences, my friend’s experiences, other people’s experiences. The generations that integrated certain schools during a certain time in American history. And as we have rounded the corner, past Obama to now, what is that feeling that we’re having right now? What triggers us? Specifically, those of us of a certain age in terms of the backlash and the pendulum swinging back. Are we moving forward or are we moving back at this moment in time in America?” She asks, “How do we move forward with the knowledge of rounding the bend faced with things we thought we’d never see again? The nature of time, the nature of history is that it’s cyclical. We’ve been through. We just didn’t want to necessarily go back through it again in our lifetime.”
Regina tells us that these are some of the questions facing Iris in “Exhibit.” “What do we do and how important is that history? Especially the questioning of it at this moment in time when there are people threatening to erase our history, our accomplishments, and our contributions. There’s the threat that this next generation will not be allowed to receive that history, to know where they come from. What can we learn from how we have made it through before? That’s the conversation I’m looking forward to next Sunday.”
The performance of “Exhibit” will take place on Sunday, March 30th at the Quarry Entertainment Center. Audience will participate in a talk-back afterwards, because Regina says, “This is not the time to be silent.”
“Exhibit” will premier at the Curious Theater in Colorado in May, to be directed by artistic director, Jada Dixon.
