Inequality and discrimination are not ghosts of the past

APELDOORN – In 2019, Urban Myth’s Martin Luther King received a Gouden Krekel as the best youth performance of the season. The show is up for review this season. The powerful theme of “equal rights for all” is not a simple black and white story. On Sunday April 23, the show can be seen from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Théâtre Orphée. Reason for a good chat with art director Jörgen Tjon A Fong.

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If only we had remained children. With children, the skin color of the other does not matter, the children do not judge on that. With children, it’s all about “justice”. It touches Jörgen Tjon A Fong, artistic director of Urban Myth and writer and director of Martin Luther King, often the most. “The iconic figure of Martin Luther King (1929-1968) may no longer mean much to children and young people. They need to be given the context that adults often already have. But as a writer, I don’t have to spend a lot of words on that. A single scene at the beginning is enough.

To make choices
This scene shows Martin Luther King, age eight, as he wants to enter a shoe store with his father, but is refused because he is black. He must go through an alley and then through a back door. This is his first confrontation with segregation: shortly after, he has to go to school and he sees how his neighbour’s boys go to a school different from his. Jörgen: “The children realize this immediately. The great injustice that you were thrown out because of your color, that you are not allowed to do what you want, that you do not have the same rights as everyone else. The Golden Cricket jury report sums up Martin Luther King well: “The battle to make the world a good place for all concerns us all. You can’t sit still, you have to make choices, even now”.

The shot
Jörgen: “The Krekels may be theater prizes for young people, but Martin Luther King is a performance that you can also attend as parents without children. Just because of the music that comes from that era; we briefly considered the Dutch translations. In combination with the story, there are so many feelings in these songs that a translation could be counterproductive.

The show begins and ends with a bang: the gunshot that killed Martin Luther King 55 years ago on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. In the intervening hour, we see how King opposes racial segregation in the United States, but also the resistance his resistance evokes. The show takes you through King’s life: the bus boycott, the march to Washington, his famous I have a dream speech.

Something is wrong
Tjon A Fong has received much acclaim for the clever and insidious way in which he also makes racial segregation tangible in the audience. Suddenly, a white director appears in front of the group of players, who highlights the inequality with his wishes and decisions. You sense something is off here, but the hesitation you feel as a viewer makes it clear that the Martin Luther King theme still holds true. Inequality and discrimination are not ghosts of the past.

These are also themes that Urban Myth, founded by Tjon A Fong – who has also been director of De Kleine Komedie in Amsterdam for a year – brilliantly stages in most of his performances. Critically acclaimed We Had Love, We Had Guns about the civil rights movement in 1960s America is also about this. “We always make a strong connection with the present. Our society is changing, we ask questions about what we have learned from this past, what we can learn from it. With Martin Luther King also, you begin to wonder if the view you have of your environment still corresponds to reality. In the end, you must choose which side you are on.

For more information: www.orpheus.nl