Plays / Chronology / Pure Confidence / More About Pure Confidence The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2005 Humana Festival PURE CONFIDENCE Carlyle Brown entered the world of great black jockeys through a series of serendipitous accidents. It all began when he was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera to rewrite the book of a musical called St. Louis Woman—a piece that was first produced in the 1940s with music by Harold Arlen. While the original was, in Brown’s characteristically frank opinion, the most “racist, misogynist thing that you could ever imagine,” it did introduce him, through the musical’s central character, to the little-known history of America’s first great black athletes: the slave jockeys that dominated horseracing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. As writer Edward Hotaling reveals in his book The Great Black Jockeys, “more than a century before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, black athletes were dominating America’s first national sport. The sport was horseracing, and the greatest jockeys of all were slaves and the sons of slaves.” When Marc Masterson, Actors Theatre’s artistic director, and director Clinton Turner Davis broached the topic of writing a play about the subject for the Humana Festival of New American Plays, Brown’s latent knowledge was at his fingertips. While the impetus to join Brown and the subject came from an outside source, it is hardly a surprising topic for him to tackle. Known for his incisive and illuminating looks at little-known aspects of African-American history, this subject matter was a perfect match to Brown’s passions and skill. It also provided Brown a unique angle into a relationship that continues, to a large extent, to define race relations in this country: the relationship between master and slave—or in this case between horse owner and slave jockey. “It was a fruitful situation,” Brown explains. “Here’s a guy who has a black jockey, and since they’re extraordinary athletes, [the horse owner] couldn’t treat the jockey like a slave. You can’t make a person do something like that. You can encourage them to be great, but you can’t make them.” This transformation of the central tenets of the master-slave relationship is at the heart of this play, which explores the ambiguity that often lurked within the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. Beginning in the period immediately preceding the Civil War, Pure Confidence tells the story of Simon Cato, a remarkably skilled and confident jockey who is determined to ride his way to freedom. Loosely based on a number of historical slave jockeys, Simon is certain of his talents and determined to benefit from the unique flexibility his value as an athlete allows him in an otherwise rigid and deeply unjust system. Simon is both helped and hindered in his mission by Colonel Wiley “The Fox” Johnson, a horse owner who hires out Simon’s services, but is eventually convinced, through a series of clever negotiations by Simon, to buy the jockey and allow him to “buy himself free.” This unusual plan puts into sharp relief the exceptions and ambiguities inherent in the relationship between this uniquely valuable slave and his owner. But while Simon and the Colonel’s relationship may challenge our preconceptions, Brown never lets us forget the pernicious power of slavery as an institution. As the Colonel points out in one of his ultimately fruitless attempts to quash Simon’s ambitions, “… this system wasn’t made for you. That’s just the way it is. If you could hire yourself out and control the bidding we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. You’d be free and I might be you and you might be me. That’s the problem you see. White folks ain’t never going to let that happen.” While Simon is a fictionalized amalgamation of a series of historical black jockeys—many of whom demonstrated the same strength of will and vocal disdain for their white ‘masters’ that Simon does—the Colonel developed out of a more personal observation by Brown. While a student at Kentucky State College in the 1960s, Brown decided that he wanted to see the South, and that the best way to do that was to hitchhike across the Southern states. Joined by two friends who feared for his safety, Brown made it down to Alabama where he and his friends were picked up by a man who would come to represent the complexity of race relations in the South to Brown. An avowed segregationist with a mouthful of racist epithets at the ready, he nonetheless offered the three men his hospitality, providing them with a room for the night and a home-cooked meal, and telling them about the black people he liked and admired—the “exceptions to his rule.” “It always astonished me how this guy could live with these contradictions,” Brown explains. “Which is sort of the amazing thing about the South and slavery in general. That’s why they call it a ‘peculiar’ relationship. It is.” Throughout the course of the play, both in the pre-Civil War South of the first act, and in the post-Civil War North of the second (a place that racism is rendering disarmingly similar to the South it defines itself against) one of the central questions to emerge is how we, as individuals and as a country, define freedom. This concept, central to our national mythology, is complex and contradictory when laid side by side against that other American tradition: slavery. “There’s this idea of the ‘tradition’ of freedom in this country,” says Brown. “What, do you people have amnesia or what? The major part of our history was a severe contradiction of our values. And they were negative values. Not amoral, they were evil. And that’s how our nation was conceived.” Throughout the play, freedom is defined in opposition to slavery. What the play makes clear, however, is that while slavery and freedom are firmly at odds, escape from slavery is not a clear race towards freedom. Simon’s definition of freedom must change as he reaches his goal in the North only to discover an unreceptive world determined to deny him his rights. As he reveals to the Colonel late in the play, while the Civil War released him from slavery, freedom wasn’t necessarily being offered in its stead. “Freedom ain’t something you can just give away I guess,” Simon explains. The definition shifts for the Colonel and his wife Mattie as well, as they’re forced to confront their complicity in a system that they eventually acknowledge as evil. By the end of the play we’re left without easy answers about how to define freedom—a word that’s repeated over and over each day. But perhaps the term’s elusiveness is as close to a definition as we, and the characters in Brown’s insightful and incisive new play, are going to get. — Tanya Palmer CARLYLE BROWN As a young man, Carlyle Brown spent much of his time on boats doing relief work for vacationing crew, hoping to earn enough money to devote himself to his true passion: writing. When asked what prompted him to take such employment, he says, “Stupidity,” laughing at the memory. “I always wanted to be a writer so I got in a situation where I could do relief work when people needed me to and still have an opportunity to write. I wanted to see if I had any talent. I didn’t want to end up on the beach saying, I coulda been a writer!” Inspired by the novels of African-American literary giants Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Brown initially wanted to write fiction. But he discovered theatre was the place for him after taking a playwriting class. Soon, his literary efforts paid off and Brown was able to leave his “boat bum” days for good. He has received many awards, including playwriting fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Theatre Communications Group and commissions from Alabama Shakespeare Festival and Minneapolis Children’s Theatre Company. Brown is also artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company, a Twin Cities-based company that performed his play Talking Masks, which he also directed last May. Although not primarily an actor, he starred in The Fula from America, a one-man show about his 1980s trip to Africa. His plays have been noted for their originality and keen understanding of history. From a black American theatre company’s tumultuous beginnings in 1820s upstate New York to Russian novelist Alexander Pushkin’s Ethiopian great-grandfather, several of his works are grounded in fascinating but little-known episodes in black history. Still, Brown is loath to refer to his works as “history plays.” “History is a metaphor,” he explains. “If you write a contemporary play that’s about a historical subject and want it to relate to an audience, it has to have some resonance to contemporary life.” For Brown, historical subject matter also provides audiences with the distance they need to address difficult issues they may not otherwise want to discuss. “People don’t talk about slavery and its relationship to contemporary life, so much that the kinds of plays that most white theatres seem to feel are relevant about the black experience have nothing to do with white people. So we’re watching these characters suffer but there is no way the experience could be cathartic, because if we are in fact choosing plays that present the situation like that, then it’s not history, it’s voyeurism.” Brown uses his plays to interrogate history; to decipher why people acted the way they did. He doesn’t demonize his characters, even slaveholders like Pure Confidence’s Colonel. “I think that’s related to the craft of a writer, to love all your characters the way God does with His universe. You’re like God and you love them all, and they’re not all very good.” Whether exploring uncomfortable historical terrain or giving human dimensions to “not very good” characters, Brown’s creative process is ultimately about discovery. “I always ask questions when I write a play, so I’m discovering things as well. I mean I feel like if I’m sitting there and not discovering anything, how can I say anything to the audience?” — JoSelle Vanderhooft