"The Potluck": musical explora el trauma de la masacre del KKK en Greensboro en 1979 contra cinco activistas…

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day. Composer and playwright César Alvarez joins Democracy Now! to discuss their new musical, The Potluck. It tells the story of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, when Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on an antiracist demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five members of the Communist Workers’ Party. In 2020, the Greensboro City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the attack and the police department’s complicity in the killings. Alvarez tells Democracy Now! the musical is an attempt to grapple with “what it has meant to grow up in the aftermath of this state-sanctioned murder,” as well their personal connection to the massacre. Alvarez’s parents were part of the Communist Workers’ Party, and Alvarez is named in honor of two of their slain comrades. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow. org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We turn now to The Potluck. It’s a musical about the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which five protesters in North Carolina at an anti-Klan rally there were gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. Those killed were members of the Communist Workers’ Party. Ten other activists were injured. No one was convicted, but a jury did find the Greensboro police liable for cooperating with the KKK in a wrongful death. In 2020, Greensboro’s City Council passed a resolution apologizing for the attack and the police department’s complicity in the killings. Composer and playwright César James Alvarez was born in Greensboro a year after the murders. Their parents were among the survivors of the massacre. In a tribute to their parents’ murdered friends, César is named for two of those who were killed: César Cauce, a Cuban immigrant and union organizer, and James Waller, a pediatrician and president of the local textile workers’ union. This legacy and the weight of telling the story today form the backbone of César Alvarez’s new musical, The Potluck, presented by Soho Rep and INTAR, currently playing at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in New York through this Sunday, August 9th. For more, we’re joined by composer and playwright César Alvarez. César, I met you a few nights ago seeing this astounding play. Talk about, I mean, what you did with this play — it’s so odd to say a “massacre musical,” but so many people don’t even know what happened in 1979 — and then your family’s, your own close connection to the victims. CÉSAR ALVAREZ: Yeah, it was a real puzzle to figure out, when I was kind of invited and asked by this commission to try to tell this story, because part of me wanted to just tell the story and tell the story, which is a story that’s been so distorted over the years by the narratives around it, and also deal with the real fact of what it has meant to grow up in the aftermath of this state-sanctioned murder and to carry the name of these fallen comrades and to feel called to duty to somehow answer, answer the work that they were doing. So, the piece itself doesn’t abandon the puzzle. It actually becomes a showing of that dilemma, which so many of us carry, of how do we — how do we heal from these traumas that have happened to our families and to our ancestries, and how do we answer the call in a way that’s authentic and that actually is going to make a difference. And the piece then becomes this kind of attempt, this ritual, to unveil what teachings