(photo: en.wikipedia)

Passage Theatre Company’s current production—Little Rock: An American Play (video)—presents a compelling dramatization of how nine black students integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus allowed an angry, jeering mob of more than a thousand white protestors to intimidate the students, who, not unreasonably, feared for their lives. School desegregation was the law of the land, however, since the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, and President Eisenhower sent in troops and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to protect the students. A Civil Rights landmark, this episode was the first major test of the strength of federal support for desegregation.

This production uses nine cast members—six black and three white—to portray dozens of roles: the nine students, their parents, teachers, other students, the protesters, local and national political leaders, and young television reporter Mike Wallace. Comments of a number of people external to the events—including Louis Armstrong, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Lena Horne, Rosa Parks—are presented in vignette.

The show begins with a song, as the cast marches in, and music varies the already lively pace throughout. The single set, classroom desks facing the audience, gives the cast members a place to be while waiting their scenes in the spotlight at the front of the stage. More important, it is a constant reminder that all this turmoil was about only one thing: kids wanting an education—a good education. (That this dream still inspires and is not yet fully realized is evident not only throughout the United States, but in the 2014 award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai.)

The multi-talented cast brings playwright Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj’s conception to life. Little Rock is a reminder of what Passage Theater’s artistic director June Ballinger calls a “shameful time in American history” and of the healing that remains to done. Held over at Trenton’s Mill Hill Playhouse until November 2.