New Haven Independent

Joyce performed her 85-minute one-woman biographical play, entitled “A Rose Among Thorns,” on Saturday night.

In the show, Joyce corrects the historical account from meandering, whatever the good intentions, into mythology. For example, Parks was not a maid with tired feet but an employee of Sears Roebuck. She was not weak, tired, and exhausted from cleaning white people’s houses but rather a hale 42-year-old on the famous day and simply “sick and tired of the humiliation” of the Jim Crow laws.

The play also puts Parks into local and national context. Many other people had refused to go to the back of the bus before her. But Parks’ squeaky clean life and iron will made her a perfect test case to challenge discrimination.

Joyce’s impassioned performance also celebrates the countless unsung other heroes and everyday people whose daily courage led to the successful boycott of Montgomery, Alabama, busses, the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King, and, a decade later, the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act.

The success of the piece is that the Parks who emerges from Joyce’s performance is humanized and put in context, yet loses none of her inspirational power or iconic status. That’s no mean theatrical achievement. The repeated applause and connection between performer and audience testified not only to the professionalism of the show but the enduring meaning of the Parks story to the current generation — especially the women in the audience, such as Judy Howard, who said, “I love her perseverance.”

Their children and grandchildren, such as Howard’s granddaughter, Michaela Mathis, seemed to have much less knowledge of Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott launched in the wake of her arrest, or the broader civil rights movement on whose shoulders the current generations ride. That was all the more reason, according to Joyce and the Rosa Parks Tribute organizers, to keep the story alive and vital.

Saturday’s performance date, Dec 1, was precisely the date in 1955 that Parks refused to relinquish her seat and was arrested. The photo Joyce holds (at the top of this story) shows the original mug shot. The New Haven Rosa Parks Tribute began in 2005, with the 50th anniversary. That year, the tribute committee teamed up with Connecticut Transit to ride the bus in honor of Rosa; 2006, the second year of the tribute, featured a vintage 1953 bus, which the committee rented, parked downtown, and invited in old-timers tell a new generation their stories. This year, with Ella Joyce’s performance launched to high praise in Los Angeles in February, the committee brought the play to New Haven.

The success of the piece, whose dramatic frame is Rosa telling her whole story after death, from heaven, as it were, was measured not only in the you-could-drop-a-pin silence from adults and kids alike as they saw Rosa Parks come to life. It was measured also in the post-performance testimonials of people like Ruth Jackson. Jackson was a young 23-year-old mother in Montgomery in 1955 and rode the same bus line as Parks.

“I can’t get over how much they look alike,” she said. “And it was really like that. I walked ten miles to work for months,” she said. “I worked at the Freckles and Frills store, not far from Rosa at Sears in downtown Montgomery. It was rough, yes, but also fun. A certain camaraderie. Black people with cars picked you up and took you downtown,” she said, “and the white people at Freckles and Frills were so happy to see us.”

The economic pressure on the downtown Montgomery businesses led to the boycott’s eventual success in court. Joyce explained, all the while staying in character, that whites tried to keep Negro-driven cars (of the kind that picked up Jackson) off the road by having the insurance agents — nearly all white — cancel policies. A young minister named Martin Luther King found a black insurance agent in Atlanta to write new policies.

Ella Joyce, whose aim is to keep Parks’ story and tradition alive and celebrated, invited Ruth Jackson up to the stage for a great hug.

This woman, Denise Rogers, rose to say how moved she was by the piece. She said she was speaking as a black person and a woman who just happens to have driven a bus for the past nine years for Connecticut Transit. “Drive a bus,” she emphasized. “Not just sit on it.”

A social studies teacher from New Haven’s Micro Society Magnet Elementary School, Zania Collier (pictured below), expressed gratitude to Joyce. She said she taught the history not only of Parks and other Civil Rights names writ large, but lesser known people mentioned at length in Joyce’s piece.

“Your students are blessed,” said Joyce, “to have a teacher like you.”

Parks was surrounded by people who enabled her to be a symbol, a role she reluctantly but eventually accepted. She received the 1999 Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. After her death at 92 in 2005, she was the first black woman to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda. Among those indispensable to Parks were E.D. Dixon, the head of the Montgomery NAACP (an organization considered radical at the place and time), who recruited her for the role; and Professor JoAnn Robinson, who was the boycott’s major organizer, go-to-figure, and distributor of some 35,000 “don’t ride the bus handbills” in that pre-Internet era. Roberts herself had been arrested for refusal to go to the back of the bus way back in 1942.

“A few weeks before I refused and got arrested,” Joyce-as-Parks said, “a young girl refused, was thrown off my same bus, and was arrested. But she was only 15 and pregnant, and that was giving too much to the white folks to poke at.”

“And there was even a Negro woman,” Parks said, in character, “who successfully sued back in 1884 for not being allowed to ride where she wished on a train. The case was overturned, of course, in the Supreme Court.”

But the journey to the 1960s had begun. An anonymous quotation, printed in the program, said, “When a colored woman in America gets tired … things change.”

After a dramatic entrance in which Joyce approaches a vase and literally smells the roses — they turn out to be the roses of heaven — Joyce spends much of the show in a chair, with simple props used to impressive effect: like the Life magazine on whose cover Parks was featured; white gloves, which she wore on subsequent arrests; and a tea cup. She was denied water for many hours after the arrest, and Joyce-Parks’s hands are shaking by the time she swallows a first drop. You could hear the clinking throughout the Wexler-Grant auditorium.

“A Rose Among Thorns” is in its 40th performance. It is booked in Denver next week and then at various venues throughout the spring. “I think it’s very important,” Joyce said, “to make Parks’ story a must-read not only for black but white audiences as well.” She recommends that Parks’ autobiography, written with Jim Haskins, be required reading in the schools.

Ella Joyce has a long list of TV, film, and stage credits, including creating original roles for several of August Wilson’s plays. She also worked at the Yale Rep under one of its most influential directors, Lloyd Richards. Like Joyce’s play, the Rosa Parks Tribute in New Haven is a labor of love and an act of transmission to new generations of African-Americans, according to lead organizer Dorthula Green. To support this and future Rosa Parks Tribute events in New Haven, the contact is Dorthula Green at this website and this email address.

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