Create
Truth gets told in Lance Felton’s ‘Black History’
For his one-man show Black History They Don’t Want You to Know, writer and performer Lance Felton knew he would have to face some uncomfortable truths head-on.
On the surface, he says, the play is literally what the title implies – the fact that there are parts of the African American story that are being removed from (or have never been in) textbooks and school curricula.
On a deeper level, “It’s a story about family. Oftentimes I find that grandparents and their generation, even my mother and my aunts, tend to shy away from communicating with my generation. There are things that could be lost in that narration of what has happened.
“So it’s about making sure that we continue to tell those stories, and link those generations.”
If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.
Directed by Bob Devin Jones, Black History They Don’t Want You to Know will be presented as a staged reading Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Green Bench Brewing’s Webb’s City Cellar.
It’s part of American Stage’s summer series Beyond the Stage.
Felton did a bigger production of the show – also directed by Jones – at Stageworks Theatre last February (he is a playwright-in-residence at the Tampa playhouse).
Webb’s City Cellar is small. It’s intimate. “It’ll be nice to just let the words flow, without the production elements,” Felton says. “And to really try and understand, myself, why I wrote it. It’s a living document. It’s growing as I’m performing it and doing it in new spaces.”
During the performance, Felton meets several historical figures who set him straight.
He came face-to-face with revisionist history, he explains, when he wrote a one-act play called Tampa Bay Leadership Legacies for Stageworks in 2023. “It was written right before the book-banning laws started coming out … and then we were asked to do it after the book-banning laws. But we had to do an edit of the script.”
An administrator for the Hillsborough County School Board took exception to a section in the play describing how Tampa-born NAACP leader Robert Saunders had led a long-ago protest, encouraging followers to burn the city’s then-prevalent “For Coloreds Only” signs.
Felton was ordered to cut the section. “And the actor performing that monologue did not get that update, and so he performed that piece.
“In the moment, coming off the stage, we have people telling us to stop the show, just cut to the end and move on. It was a really shocking way to look at the times we’re in.”
Felton, a graduate of the theater program at Blake High School, studied Human Rights (and Filmmaking) at the University of South Florida. And the censorship incident got him thinking about “What the breaking down of how we tell history is doing to our kids, and our future.”
He now teaches 5th and 6th grade history at Academy Prep Tampa. At the beginning of summer school this year, “I led the classroom on a discussion of Juneteenth. And the struggle that it is sometimes, when it feels so uncomfortable. Some of these students don’t have the tools to really process the magnitude of what happened.
“All races who participated suffered from what they called Post-Traumatic Slave Disorder. It’s something that we have to deal with, and reconcile, otherwise we continue patterns that we might be doing subconsciously. In my opinion.”
As an actor, he has appeared in a dozen plays, on both sides of the bay, and intends to keep pursuing a career in theater. “I’m going to auditions, learning the ins and outs of the business, learning producing, learning directing … and still learning. That’s not to say I learned anything, but just to say that I’ve become aware of the process.”
In a Catalyst interview earlier this month, director Jones sang Felton’s praises. “He’s just a little bit over Jesus’ age, but he’s on fire,” Jones said. “I didn’t get on fire until my 40s. And he has the credentials – just by the fact that he’s living – to speak his truth. And he definitely knows how to do that. And that, James Baldwin says, is all you can write about, what you know to be true”
Felton is very interested in truth-telling. “I come from a family of educators, so one of the main things that I believe is that theater is a great tool for social justice,” he explains. “I read a journal not too long ago, and not to be disrespectful of Rosa Parks, the author wrote that her sit-in could be seen as performance theater. She was performing as if she had the right to sit in. That could be seen as theater that sparked a reaction from the community.
“And we see so many examples of that. The lunch counter sit-ins. Not that these people are acting or pretending, but carrying the truth. And that is something to be looked at, and marveled at.
“And so I think that what I do in the classroom is no different from what I do on the stage. It’s a convergence of everything I’ve ever worked hard for.”
Tickets for the staged reading of Black History They Don’t Want You to Know are available at this link.
