EVENT PREVIEW
“Only Just a Minute”
Aug. 20-23
Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at Morehouse College, 830 Westview Drive S.W., Atlanta.
Aug. 20 is preview night, 8 p.m. All tickets are $25.
Aug. 21 is student night, 8 p.m. Tickets range from $25 for students with ID to $45.
Aug. 22, 8 p.m., is the opening night gala. All VIP tickets, $100; of that, $55 will go to the Morehouse Board Opportunity Fund. Includes reception. Regular tickets range from $25 to $45.
Aug. 23, 3 and 8 p.m. Tickets range from $25 to $45.
Aug. 27-Sept. 7
Southwest Arts Center, 915 New Hope Road, Atlanta.
8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; matinees, 3 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays.
Tickets range from $25 for seniors and students with ID to $35.
For tickets and information: www.onlyjustaminute.com
The educator and the preacher.
The relationship between Benjamin E. Mays and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. resembled that of father and son and mentor and protege.
A new play, "Only Just a Minute," is inspired by that relationship and their lives as both fight for equal rights for African-Americans.
“Only Just a Minute,” which runs from Aug. 20 through Sept. 7 at two venues in Atlanta, is the story of how Mays comes to terms with the assassination of his friend and protege while still embracing his philosophy of nonviolence. Those beliefs are challenged by younger African-Americans and by reporter Max Mitchell, who is influenced by the more aggressive politics of Malcolm X and Bobby Seale and argues against the nonviolent principles that guided both Mays and King.
In the play, Mays goes back in time to his own childhood and his journey to where he sits today.
Much is known about King, but that’s not the case, particularly among younger people, for Mays, who served as the president of Morehouse College, which King attended; and was also a leader in his own right in the movement.
The play was an effort by producer Bob Dockery Jr., who graduated from Morehouse in 1966, to “honor the legacy” of Mays, said Thomas W. Jones II, the director and a longtime fixture on the African-American theatrical scene, having co-founded Jomandi Productions.
“This is a way to recognize those who came before us, who are not always visible,” Jones said. King’s “trajectory may have been quite different had it not been for men like Benjamin Mays.” He called Mays an “intellectual father” to King, to whom he continued to counsel over the years.
Mays delivered King’s eulogy after his assassination in April 1968. The two had promised that the one who outlived the other would deliver that person’s eulogy.
“Let it be thoroughly understood that our deceased brother did not embrace nonviolence out of fear or cowardice,” Mays said in his remarks at Morehouse that day. “Moral courage was one of his noblest virtues. As Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British Empire without a sword and won, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the interracial wrongs of his country without a gun.”
Jones, 57, has a personal connection to the King family. He went to school with King’s eldest child, Yolanda King, who died in 2007, and he said he knows Dexter King socially.
The play runs Aug. 20-23 at the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at Morehouse College. After that, it moves to the Southwest Arts Center, where it runs Aug. 27-Sept. 7.
It stars Willie Carpenter, whose extensive acting credits include TV’s “Devious Maids” and “Reasonable Doubts,” as Mays. King is played by Anthony Manough, and Mitchell is played by Enoch King.
The roles required “really smart actors,” Jones said. The play “is steeped heavily in language.”
Jones said “Only Just a Minute” does not purport to be a “historical treatise on these men” but will leave audiences with a better understanding of both.
