Off-Broadway's Learning Curve delves into event that shook CU

Photos by Nick Andrews From left: Demond Robertson, Mike Hodge, Graeme Malcolm and John McAdams in a surreal classroom scene from Learning Curve, which played last month off-Broadway. The play is partly based on events that took place at Cornell in 1969, though the university isn't named in the fictional story.
	Demond Robertson and Natalia Payne in a scene from Learning Curve.

By Linda Myers

The photograph in the poster for Learning Curve, an off-Broadway play that had a limited run last month, is one of those images engraved on the national psyche.

It shows four black students carrying rifles as they emerge from Willard Straight Hall in 1969 after a standoff of 36 hours during which they occupied Cornell's student union. "The image haunted me after I saw it in the newspaper," said the play's producer, Betty Ann Besch Solinger, who serves on the board of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and is the widow of David Solinger, Class of '26, a prominent supporter of Cornell.

But photographs can lie -- or at least not tell the entire story. The actual takeover was accomplished without weapons -- rifles were later smuggled into the Straight. The protesters -- most of them young black students struggling to fit into a predominantly white campus for the first time in their lives -- were fearful that they'd be harmed, or worse, when they surrendered. They decided to do it by walking out of the building's front entrance proudly and defiantly carrying the guns.

While the standoff ended peacefully and led to such positive developments as the hiring of black faculty and the formation of an Africana studies department, the photograph, shot by Steve Starr and now owned by The Associated Press, was printed in newspapers around the globe and won a Pulitzer Prize. The exposure led to a firestorm of criticism, the university's then president, James Perkins, resigned, and Cornell went through decades of soul searching before coming to terms with what had happened.

Solinger, a former producer of "The Dick Cavett Show" on television, films and such Broadway plays as John Guare's House of Blue Leaves, says she was moved to find out more about what lay behind the photograph. "I listened to oral histories, found and interviewed students who took part in the takeover and a few who didn't, and many people on the faculty and in the administration," she said. "I thought that the story would make a wonderful documentary. But in time, I decided that what I found so fascinating, so moving, so varied, so contradictory in the story, could best be revealed in a work of art, specifically a theater piece."

Solinger selected Rogelio Martinez, a young Cuban-American playwright, to write the play. "At first I worried whether I had the right to write it, but then I realized that I knew what it was like to grow up feeling like an outsider, a minority," said Martinez, who was born in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, two years after the takeover and arrived in the United States on the Mariel boat lift at age 9. For that reason and others, he made the issue of "who has the right to tell someone's story" central to the play, he said.

The play was received favorably. A Time Out reviewer wrote: "Martinez depicts racism not as a monolithic evil but as a filter through which even the most sympathetic characters view the world." And Frank Robinson, director of the Johnson Museum, called it: "An exciting and fascinating play for anyone interested in the history of Cornell or, for that matter, in the history of race relations in this country. The takeover of the Straight is presented not as a simplistic, straightforward event, with good guys versus bad guys, but as a complex, sensitive, human interplay of relationships between the races, the sexes and the generations."

In the play, David, a young black man from a small southern city, arrives at an Ivy League university in upstate New York -- Cornell is never mentioned by name. Soon after David's arrival, his history professor tells him he's not smart enough to be at the college. Like everyone else David encounters, white and black, the professor holds assumptions about who David is and what his role should be.

Unlike David, who asserts he's at college only to get an education, several characters seek to be participants in what they declaim is a historical moment -- the conflux of the civil rights movement, women's movement and escalating Vietnam conflict. One of them is Sally, the professor's rebellious daughter, who promptly seduces David, then takes pictures of him asleep in his dorm room that get exhibited under the title "Up from the Ghetto" by her photography professor, who mistakes David in the pictures for a homeless black man.

Another is a black classmate of David's, who keeps whispering the word "revolution" to him as they clear dishes in a dining hall, their campus job. Proclaiming he's "here to change the monolithic system that is Western history," he berates David for letting a white woman tell his story. David asks Sally to take down the photographs, but after they are slashed by an unknown assailant she insists they stay up and wants to reveal they are of him, in the name of art and truth. Angry, lonely and scared, David begins spending more time with his more activist black classmates, who remove the photographs in return for his allegiance.

The story is told in flashback, with intermittent scenes of a much older David returning to campus to take classes among students of today, including a stoned, pizza-munching study mate who "googles" him to learn he once took over a campus building. The takeover is described in a lecture by another contemporary character, an Africana studies professor: "What kept [the protesters] together was an understanding that some fundamental wrong had been done to them. Some were able to articulate what it was, other were simply able to feel it," he says.

While Solinger says the play is "not about lessons," Santayana's famous dictum about those who cannot learn from history is alluded to when a character remarks that the university's 1969 yearbook -- an actual prop in the play -- contains no mention of the takeover.

Meanwhile at Cornell today, the faces of the freshman class are more diverse than ever; the university annually awards the James Perkins Prize for Racial Understanding and Harmony; there are active minority alumni associations; the Africana Studies and Research Center, began in 1969 as a direct result of the takeover, just revamped and expanded its building -- and 1969 seems long past.