“The enemy wasn’t just overseas,” said playwright and director Ricardo Khan. “The American people – who didn’t believe black people could fly airplanes simply because they were black – was the enemy too.”
Through his play Fly, co-written with Trey Ellis, Khan will bring the complex yet uplifting story of the Tuskegee Airmen to The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis main stage next week.
“And that’s our enemy now: anybody who doesn’t think that we can fly – in whatever way you take flying to be,” Khan said. “Anybody who limits our reach is our enemy – including ourselves.”
There were inherent obstacles in bringing the experience of the Tuskegee Airmen to the stage.
“They were in the Army, so there were so many emotions that they could not show,” Khan said. “They were black, and there were so many frustrations that they could not let out because they knew they were representing their entire race.”
The question was how to dramatize these feelings and emotions that the Airmen were not allowed to express. The answer was The Tap Griot, a character who dances through the pain hidden in the Airmen’s heroism.
Fly explores the racism the Airmen faced even before they flew over enemy soil.
“We told the Alabama part of the story first because when they went to train there in Tuskegee, Alabama, racial tension existed and pressure existed,” Khan said. “They had to face racial intolerance on U.S. soil. In the course of fighting, they had to overcome the fact that white bomber pilots did not trust them simply because they were black.”
Khan and Crossroads Theatre – an African-American troupe out of New Brunswick, N.J. he co-founded more than 30 years ago – were initially commissioned by New York’s Lincoln Center of The Performing Arts to produce a play about the Tuskegee Airmen for the stage as a teaching piece.
“I don’t know how old I was when I learned of them, but I was certainly an adult and I didn’t know about the Tuskegee Airmen,” Khan said. “And when I learned about it, that was a huge education for me.”
Khan wrote the play with Trey Ellis, and the initial goal was to reach as well as teach young people.
“As I conceived the play, I wanted it to be as exciting and visually stimulating as any video game would be – as any action movie would be,” Khan said. “I didn’t want young people to be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m coming to theatre.’ I wanted to turn young people on.”
It ended up resonating with many people.
“This is a story of all people – not just black people – overcoming the worst parts of our history,” Khan said. “These men and women were not saying, ‘We’re black, give us a break.’ They were saying, ‘We are great, and we are going up there and we are going to prove our greatness.’ And they did.”
Fly was then expanded from a 55-minute education piece to a full-length play and presented on the Crossroads Theatre stage in 2009. “‘Fly’ blew me away,” New York Times theatre critic Anita Gates wrote of the theatre company’s premiere.
“There is something in us all that, in our own way, wants to fly,” Khan said. “What connects everybody in the audience with the play is I think Fly says we can.”
Khan is also directing of The Rep’s production of Fly, which stars Greg Brostrom, Eddie R. Brown III, Will Cobbs, Cary Donaldson, Omar Edwards, David Pegram, Timothy Sekk and Terrell Donnell Sledge.
The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis will present “Fly” October 16 – November 10 at the Loretto-Hilton Center, 130 Edgar Road, Webster Groves. For tickets, show times and additional information, visit www.repstl.org or call (314) 968-4925.
