Artists & Communities Host Site: Zachary Scott Theatre Center
1510 Toomey Road
Austin, TX 78704
Web site: www.zachscott.com

Millennium Artist:
Marsha Jackson-Randolph
Writer, Director, Actor
Georgia

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Playwright Marsha Jackson-Randolph has long worked from a fascination with oral histories and the history of place, specifically how African American people change a place and are themselves changed by the communities in which they live.

Over the past year, she has pursued this interest by exploring the life and times of noted national leader and native Texan Barbara Jordan through her Artists & Communities residency with Austin's Zachary Scott Theatre and with the African American community in Houston's Fifth Ward.

Born in Houston in 1936, Barbara Jordan was elected to the Texas Senate in 1966, becoming the first African American woman to serve in that body. She went on to become the first black elected official to preside over the Senate, the first black Senator to chair a major committee, and the first freshman Senator ever named to the Texas Legislative Council. Subsequently elected a U.S. Congressman in 1972, Barbara Jordan championed the rights of poor, black, and disadvantaged people, specifically voting rights, and gained national prominence in supporting the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Marsha Jackson-Randolph commenced her residency by interviewing community members about Barbara Jordan's earliest influences: her family, neighborhood, church, public school and higher education. A second and third round of interviews focused on family members, then on women from Barbara Jordan's church community. At each stage Jackson-Randolph shared early drafts of her writing, seeking response to her work.

Jackson-Randolph then conducted a series of drama workshops with children from Barbara Jordan Elementary School, sharing her research and exploring the similarities and differences in their young lives. She held similar discussions with women who would be the same age as Ms. Jordan if she were alive today, tracing how their lives intersected with significant events in her professional life: the early Civil Rights movement, her time in law school, election to the Texas legislature, participation in the Nixon impeachment hearings.

A staged reading of Marsha Jackson-Randolph's draft play was presented at Zachary Scott Theatre in December 2000 for those who had participated in the play's development.

Jackson-Randolph has continued to revise her script in consultation with community participants, workshopping the play with professional actors from Zachary Scott Theatre Center, and developing a shortened version of the play suitable for presentation to young audiences.

Commenting on her residency and artistic process, Jackson-Randolph said, "….my recent work has attempted to address issue of class, gentrification, civil rights, and women's rights….a treatise of the spirit which made heroes and "she-roes" of common men and women….I am interested in those projects which positively assert our cultural differences and which enable the generations to share heritage and achieve new common ground, and to discover or understand new and profound definitions of freedom."

MILLENNIUM ARTIST BIO

Marsha Jackson-Randolph is a writer, director, actor, and co-founder of Atlanta's Jomandi Productions whose work has been featured through the National Black Theatre, National Black Arts Festivals, and the Joyce Theatre in New York. She is the recipient of commissions supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and AT & T.