Youngstown, Canfield students find common ground in Tony-winning play

CANFIELD

Two schools with little in common — one from the suburbs and one from the inner city — are doing more than staging a play that focuses on a taboo: racial strife.

The students are learning. About each other.

Canfield Players Drama Club from Canfield High School and Chaney’s Visual and Performing Arts students have been rehearsing “Ragtime” for weeks on both schools’ stages.

Some of the language is coarse, but the students and directors maintain it’s reflective of the time period and shouldn’t detract from the show’s message.

The Tony-award-winning play tells the story of three groups of people at the beginning of the 20th Century in New Rochelle, N.Y. — the upper-class New Rochelle residents, the residents of Harlem and the Eastern European immigrants, many of whom are Jewish — and how their lives intersect.

Play-goers therefore should not be surprised that some characters use ethnic and racial slurs.

“One of the first things that we did was to discuss that,” said Rebecca Heikkinen, Canfield director, who is also a guidance counselor. “Before we even read through the play, we discussed that.”

The original script is dotted with the “N-word,” both spoken and in song and the character of Willie Conklin, the fire chief, is one of the biggest offenders.

He’s portrayed by Canfield sophomore Zachery Bernat, who struggled with that word.

“I had to talk to my parents,” he said. “I had to make sure they would be OK with me saying those things.”

His parents assured him they understood he was portraying a role.

He then wrestled with saying them to Joshua Green, a black actor who portrays Coalhouse Walker Jr., one of the leads. Green, a non-student who is a guest artist in the play, also assured him that it was the character saying the ugly word to another character, not Zachery saying it to Green.

“He told me that when he was in the show before, the guy that played Willie Conklin ended up being one of his good friends,” Zachery said.

Ultimately, Heikkinen and Tracy Schuler-Vivo, Chaney’s VPA coordinator, decided to replace the “N-word” in the script with “Negro.”

“We don’t want people coming to the show, not hearing and understanding the many important points that are being made because they’re focusing on something like a word,” Heikkinen said.

Schuler-Vivo said there are so many beautiful messages in the show, and they don’t want people to come away with the wrong one.

Read more about the joint production in Sunday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.