The Westport Center for the Arts presents the Black History play Only the Wounds and Weapons Have Changed between March 17 and April 1, 2023. The original play by Kansas City playwrights Jacqueline Gafford and Scott Meyers will be performed at the Just Off Broadway Theater, 3051 Central.

An interracial playwright team, Jacqueline Gafford and Scott Myers, have collaborated since January, 2021 to write Only the Wounds and Weapons Have Changed. This original Black History play features many lesser-known people who have played key roles in the struggle to completely liberate people who were captured and shipped from Africa to America to be sold as slaves. The play dismantles what author James Baldwin called “the white falsification of history”, showing instead the whole truth by creating dialogues that could have taken place between people who were actual contemporaries.  

Gafford and Meyers chose many lesser known, yet significant people, relationships, and events to assure they aren’t erased from history, but instead are celebrated and understood.

Examples of scenes that deepen audience understanding are:

• A dialogue between jazz singer/pianist/forgotten film super star, Hazel Scott,  mystic/writer, Dr. Howard Thurman and opera/spiritual singer, Marian Anderson.
• A scene with Fannie Lou Hamer and Ida B. Wells
• The deep friendship and artistic collaboration between James Baldwin, writer, and Beauford Delaney, painter, both LGBTQ arts pioneers.

The play includes Kansas City people to kindle local interest:  

• Leon Jordan, pioneering Black politician and police detective (in a scene with Bayard Rustin, who organized the March on Washington)
• Lucille Bluford, pioneering journalist who put the Kansas City Call newspaper on the map (in a scene with Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, Alabama)

Scenes from the play will be performed in several local libraries, including Bluford and Southeast in Kansas City and at the main Johnson County library