Theatre and Reality

Last year I was commissioned by Stageworks in Tampa to write a play about the sit-ins in 1960 that resulted in the desegregation of lunch counters throughout the city. As I researched the play, I learned that one of its key characters would have to be Reverend A. Leon Lowry, the African American minister who was the head of the Florida NAACP at the time. Once a courageous barber named Clarence Fort started the sit-ins, Reverend Lowry brought his organization behind them, and then negotiated with the lunch counter owners for the end of Jim Crow practices. It was a dangerous role to play in a massively racist community, and in fact someone fired two shots into Lowry’s bedroom one night during the talks, missing him and his wife by only a few feet. Undaunted, he went on to convince the owners of Woolworth’s, Kress, and other department stores to serve Black diners side by side with whites. It was a happy ending to a story that might have gone many different ways.

Yesterday I sat down with the Reverend’s widow, Shirley Lowry, at a restaurant in north Tampa to discuss her husband and to sharpen my sense of his character for my play’s sake. With us was Wendy Leigh, an artistic consultant who’s done much to alert the Black community in Tampa and St. Petersburg to the first staged reading of the play on Sunday, April 24. I asked Shirley (the late Reverend’s second wife) to tell me the sorts of details that could inform my writing – and she enthusiastically answered all my questions from “How did his friends address him - as Reverend or as Leon?” (Outside the church, she said, people called him “Dr. Lowry.”) And “Was he quiet-spoken or boisterous in public?” (He was a good listener who kept long silence until he felt it time to speak up with his booming, authoritative voice.) The hour we spent together was eye-opening and has already resulted in some changes to my script. Before we parted, Shirley told me she’d be happy to help as needed. I walked away charmed and grateful.

And now the real suspense begins: because I’ve had to reduce a story that took months and involved literally hundreds of demonstrators, racists, police, politicians, and journalists into a stageable 16-character play that lasts under two hours. Thanks to Shirley Lowry’s help, that piece has a better chance than ever of communicating not just facts but truth: the truth of a brave man who risked death for the sake of human dignity. I’ll be watching and listening closely on the 24th - to the play and to the audience talkback afterwards - to determine whether I’ve done justice to a great man who was one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s professors and an American hero. And later I’ll ask Shirley Lowry whether I came close to getting the man right.