Theatre director Jacqee Gafford has something of a motto that overarches her work: only the wounds and weapons change.
She used to feature this concept in a speech she did on Black history.
It meant, to her, “now the wounds may not be lashes across your back, they may be someone trying to take your house. The weapon may once have been a whip, now it’s the law.”
She keeps it in mind when she’s writing her plays, which mostly deal with little-known Black history and are often based on wondering what the conversation might be like if historical figures came together, and how that conversation might link to issues in today’s news.
She says her plays are fact based. “They may not be absolutely true, but they could be.”
In fact, she and co-writer Scott Myers adopted the phrase “Only the Wounds and Weapons Have Changed” for the title of the work they are currently producing for the Westport Center for the Arts. Although the characters – two young people on a slave ship, the journalist Ida B. Wells, the newspaper editor William Trooter, Kansas City’s Call Newspaper Editor Lucille Bluford, and local political figure Bruce R. Watkins – are not necessarily household names, she thinks maybe they should be. Their history has lessons for young people today.
“When I hear about a Black man being beaten by a policeman, I think, the same things have been going on forever,” she says.
Although the play takes place in an earlier time of lynching and Exodusters, what occurs “has happened thousands and thousands of times.”
Gafford moved around all over the country as a child, often to places where her family members were the only Black faces. She developed a love of theatre, even majoring in it at college. When she finally settled in Kansas City, Gafford says, she spent a long time looking for Black theatre before “someone finally told me there was no Black theatre.” She found work at the Theatre for Young America and directing at the Unicorn. Gafford also helped to form the theatre company InPlay, with a mission of reflecting the multicultural character of the United States. And that’s when she began to write scripts.
“When the company was started, we were broke,” she says. “We couldn’t afford to pay royalties for a published play. So I started writing.”
InPlay is now working frequently with the Westport Center for the Arts. Gafford and WCA’s Scott Myers have done about five plays together. During the pandemic, they started collaborating on “Only the Wounds and Weapons Have Changed,” which will premier March 17 and run through April 1 at the Just Off Broadway Theatre. (link to tickets)
Westport Center for the Arts also plans to offer Gafford’s play “Nothing Comes to Sleepers” later this year. It takes place in a beauty shop in Kansas City on the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. It gave her a chance to explore the 1960s, including the scene in Kansas City, the Vietnam War, and the Black Panthers.
Like her other works, Gafford hopes this one will be a jumping off point for people to delve into history and learn how little anything changes except the wounds and weapons.