The Alliance Theatre: 'The Nacirema Society Requests ...'

Cleage makes this case in her new play “The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years.” It makes its Atlanta premiere at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Alliance Theatre.

For Cleage, an artist known for her willingness to wrestle with civil rights history, the play is something of a departure. Set in Montgomery a couple of months before the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus bridge — a pivotal event known as Bloody Sunday — the show is a romantic comedy, full of socialites, secrets and glasses of sherry.

It comes to the Alliance stage at a moment when civil rights legacy and imagery are being embraced in popular culture in ways that go beyond deferential, and, in some cases, edge toward the irreverent.

Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett’s novel “The Help,” which tells the story of black domestics during the 1960s, is still high on best-sellers lists and is being adapted for film. Conservative icon Glenn Beck held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington. And a vintage episode of “The Boondocks” where King returns to chide a certain group of contemporary African-Americans is among the most popular in the satiric cartoon series.

Now comes Cleage’s “Nacirema Society,” which does something clever and fresh with the civil rights narrative. The playwright makes the tumult and tension of the era recede almost to the point of invisibility. Cleage focuses instead on the machinations and shenanigans of Montgomery’s black elite — the doctors, lawyers, ministers and socialites of the 1960s. Theirs was a community that had thrived for generations, often overshadowed by social justice campaigns.

While there are brief references in the play to “Freedom Summer,” the Montgomery bus boycott and Selma, the characters in “Nacirema Society” are more concerned with proper dinner attire and getting their names in society columns than they are with protests.

“I wanted to stop that draping of everything in such a serious cloth that you end up with this back-lit, Negro history month moment,” Cleage said.

A familiar subject

It’s a world familiar to Cleage, whose maternal side of the family has Montgomery roots that go back to before the Civil War, and whose grandmother always served tea from her silver teapot. Her paternal side of the family were major landowners in Michigan’s Idlewild, a prominent resort and playground for upper- and middle-class blacks during the early and mid-20th century. Cleage spent many a summer there.

Family history and passed-down stories provided all the fodder she needed to craft the romantic comedy.

It centers on the fictional Dunbar family of Alabama’s capitol city on the eve of the most exclusive debutante ball in town, the Nacirema Society’s 100th anniversary cotillion. But while the family matriarch, Grace, is preoccupied by the ill-fit of her granddaughter’s frothy, white presentation gown, she also tries to keep a scandalous family secret from spilling out and spoiling the event. And if she must collapse on a fainting couch like a Southern belle or lie like a steel magnolia to do it, well, it’s all in the line of family honor and duty.

Cleage completed the script about two years ago, after it was commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. But Susan Booth, artistic director for the Alliance, heard about the project and asked to read a draft of the script.

“Twenty pages in I thought, ‘Oh, I want to direct this,’ ” Booth said. “I love plays that have undeniable velocity. And this is so fresh and unexpected that it really made me want to take it on.”

Cleage immediately said yes.

A learning experience

In cooperation with the Shakespeare Festival, Booth directed the premiere of the play in Montgomery last month to sold-out audiences. It is her first time directing a Cleage work. She is also directing the Alliance’s production.

Even with the theater’s history of staging diverse work, including three other plays by Cleage, the glossy world of “Nacirema” was something of a revelation to Booth.

“But the problem was mine because I was willing to believe my narrow slice of what I thought reality was,” Booth said.

Clues had to come from elsewhere.

The 1941 etiquette book, “The Correct Thing, to Do, to Say, to Wear,” by African-American author Charlotte Hawkins Brown, proved indispensable. Women brought photographs and programs from their own cotillions. While rehearsing in Montgomery, the cast had a tutoring session with a judge who, in her younger years, was a debutante. She demonstrated how to hold perfect posture the way she was made to: By walking around with a book on her head. From the outside, the genteel world those elites created appeared unmussed from the social turbulence of the time. Certainly, it was not. Many of them fought battles behind the scenes rather than in the streets.

“The judge told us that it was the black elite of Alabama that made sure King’s salary was paid every week,” while he was a young minister in Montgomery, said Trezana Beverley. Beverley stars as the Nacirema matriarch, Grace Dunbar.

Cleage said she was confident Booth would get the mood of the piece. She was more was concerned that audiences might not believe that it was possible to pull off a romantic comedy against the backdrop of such a loaded era. Complicating matters was the fact that Cleage is known for writing family dramas that wrangle with race, gender, inequality and loss, not comedies.

Relieved to laugh

Then came opening night in Montgomery.

“You could feel people being relieved that it was a comedy,” Cleage said. “It was like, ‘Oh, we can actually laugh.’ People were happy to not feel accused.”

Afterward, audience members of all backgrounds crowded around Cleage to talk about how much it took them back to their own coming-of-age balls or how much the meddling lead character reminded them of their own grandmothers.

“And I said to myself, ‘I think we’re on to something,’ ” Cleage said.

While she created a world where people loved, laughed and schemed as the political ground shifted beneath them, she was also trying to convey something more subtle: That in constructing a world of refined living those women and men were, in their own way, correcting a misperception of what some thought it meant to be African-American.

But more than that, Cleage said, she was trying to create an American story.

“These were real people,” Cleage said. “These were not saints. These were people with messy lives, as we all have messy lives.”

Theater preview

“The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years”

$30-$50; some prices and packages may vary. Wednesday through Nov. 14. Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. NE 30309. 404-733-4650; www.alliancetheatre.org .