KENT STATE: A REQUIEM

                                                              I first heard about Kent State: A Requiem while conducting an interview with historian, professor,                                                                      playwright, and author J. Gregory Payne about his extensive research on the Kent State shootings.                                                                   Since the events at Kent State on May 4, 1970, in which four students were killed and nine injured by                                                                 the Ohio National Guard, Payne has devoted his life’s work to uncover the truth of happened the                                                                      weekend of May1-4 and what forces were behind the fatal shootings. His extensive research spans over                                                           40 years and has included countless interviews with first-hand witnesses, governing figures, family                                                                     members of the victims, and informed authorities. When I sat down with Dr. Payne it became clear to me                                                           that I knew very little about this event that changed America, the day “the War came home.”

           

Dr. Payne explained through our interview that, though after he had done countless hours of research and completed a master’s degree project on the events at Kent State, that he still had unanswered questions. He mentioned that Kent State: A Requiem was a way to examine some of those questions in a way that would allow the public to see the victims as the people they really were, rather than as the rebels that many officials and media sources painted them to be. In other words, the play shows a different side, a deeply emotional side of a complicated and controversial American tragedy.

           

This play is told from the perspective of the mother one of the victims, and though there are added characters such as the narrator, much of the dialogue in the play consists of actual quotations spoken by the real people—it is a dramatic retelling of real people, real lives. This was a vitally important aspect of the play to recognize before beginning production. It takes very special actors to create a performance that is both honest and entertaining, the stakes are raised we factor in that actors are charged with the responsibility of characterizing a real person, a real soul who once walked on this Earth, who had parents and pets, who listened to records and went to the movies, who lived so much until they were ripped from their youth so soon.

           

This story needed to be told in a way that only a way that theatre could. In theatre, the audience experiences what the characters do. This was a concept that has been missing from the telling of the shootings at Kent State. From newspapers and television reports and FBI right-ups we see caricatures of people, painted as rioters who “had it coming.” But it is far more difficult to denounce people that stand before your eyes. These young people were not different from you and me and so, for the first time, I hope you are overcome with guilt when you think of Kent State—for allowing yourself to ever think the Ohio National Guard could have been justified in murdering unarmed children.

            

The last thing I would like to point out to you is the role that the very year 1970 played in this tragedy. We would be leaving a hole if we were not to mention the fact that these were emotionally charged and bitter times for young people, confronted with the cruel reality that the idyllic world in which their parents grew up, a world seen in movies like George Lucas’s American Graffiti, with sock-hops and drive-ins and Dick and Jane and skating rinks…were as dead as all of those boys Nixon had failed to bring home from Vietnam. These young people were confronted with a bleak reality that the Kennedy’s were dead, that Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, and that they took so much of the American since of optimism with them to their graves. During this time the music reflected the tenor of a nation being turned and churned upside-down. Artists such as Simon and Garfunkel, Peter, Paul and Mary, The Rolling Stones, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young wrote the soundtrack to early 70’s and so it is vitally important to set the stage with these folk songs which tell a story in and of themselves.