February 2001 University Reporter

by Anne-Marie Kent

Frank Bispham and UMass Boston Professor Robert Johnson, Jr As New York City runs its “Paint the Town Red” winter tourism campaign, Bostonians have an additional enticement to visit the big city: the February 7th New York opening of UMass Boston Professor Robert Johnson, Jr's play The Train Ride.

The play tells the story of young Cambridge native Frank Bispham's 1943 wartime train ride into the racially segregated South. Bispham is the only African-American Marine in a group of white recruits—all destined for Camp LeJune military training to fight a common enemy overseas.
After the train crosses the Mason-Dixon line, Bispham is singled out by a white conductor and ordered into the “Coloreds Only” car. At first, he refuses. But in the end, threatened by the conductor, Bispham is ushered by an African-American porter back to the crowded car reserved for “coloreds.”

It is an act the threatens that young Marine's sprit, says Johnson, who remembers hearing the story for the first time in 1996, told by Bispham himself. He and Bispham—then retired from a long, successful career in minority business development—were at a community board meeting deciding the fate of Mattapan's Boston State Hospital. During the course of the evening, Bispham told the group about his 1943 experience. Johnson recalls the silence of the room. Everyone was visibly moved. He remembers saying, “Frank, I'd like to write that story.”

And he did. No stranger to the stage, Johnson already had five plays to his credit, including Stop and Frisk, produced at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester and featured at the Playwrights Platforms' Annual Summer Festival of New Plays in 1994, and Freedom's Journeyman, cowritten with Amy Merrill Ansara and commissioned by the Bowdoin College Bicentennial Committee.

Two years later, the play was finished. That year, The Train Ride received a staged reading as part of Playwrights Platform's Annual Summer Festival of New Plays. The following year, on October 1, it was presented in a workshop by the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center as part of their Arts and Dialogues on Race series. Later that month, it was also produced in workshop form at UMass Boston with a panel that included Frank Bispham himself. The February New York performance features a new cast of professional actors, as well as a new director, Pamela Bloom.
“I'm of course very happy that the play is opening in New York, happy that Frank Bispham's story is being told. It is an important story,” Johnson says, stressing the weighty issues raised by The Train Ride, including those of race, national identity, and questions about what it means to be an American. Playwright Johnson also is gratified by the fictional characters that he created to amplify these themes and help tell Bispham's story.

In the play, when young Bispham arrives in the “Coloreds Only” car, he meets a young woman traveling with her grandmother. Johnson explains, “This grandmother I created represents the strength of the black community in America. She has been through a great deal, but she is still cheerful, loving, and strong.” She helps “resurrect” Bispham after the crushing experience. Another character, the African-American porter who aids in ejecting Bispham, represents a kind of moral compromise that some were forced to make in the days of segregation. The porter explains to Bispham his complicity with the oppressive decision by saying, “This is my living.”

The play runs from February 7 through 10 at The American Theatre of Actors, located at 314 West 54th Street. Johnson advises those interested in seeing the play to call the American Theatre of Actors as soon as possible to reserve tickets. The number is 212-581-3044.

UMass Boston Playwright's Work Debuts in New York

by Anne-Marie Kent

Image: Frank Bispham and UMass Boston Professor Robert Johnson, Jr. (Photo republished with permission of Globe Newspaper Company, Inc)