Interview: St. Augustine Playwright Brings THREADS OF SILVER AND GOLD Home to Panama

While St. Augustine playwright, Deborah Dickey, was in Central America researching her new play about the role of women in the construction of the Panama Canal called THREADS OF SILVER AND GOLD, a chance meeting with a new friend would open up an exciting and totally unexpected opportunity.

Dickey recalls, "I went down to Panama to do research and I went to all the big wonderful museums there. There is one called the Afro-Antilliano, which is West Indian museum. It's a small, cute little church on The Edge of Panama City, out of the way in a West Indian neighborhood. I had an entree with someone there to have a tour, but after I had done all of the other museums, I didn't know if I wanted to make the trip all the way over there. It was the last morning before our plane was leaving that afternoon and I said, 'I'll just go over there this morning and take the tour.' Marcia Henry was there - she's a friend of the Museum. I get so emotional about her because she's so emotional. After they gave me the official tour, Marcia just happened to be there that day, she came over, and I started talking to this woman. We were like kindred spirits. I was just casually and naively talking - I didn't really know what the situation was in Panama or how West Indians were treated. I asked something about prejudice and she said 'Don't talk to me about prejudice!' Oops ... But it really opened the conversation, she absolutely wanted to talk. She has a foundation, the Marcia L. Henry Foundation, which supports the education of young West Indian women, and when she wants something done, she gets it done and no one can say no." Then just last Spring, the playwright was contacted by the strong-willed Henry - a request that Dickey could certainly not deny. It was an invitation to present a reading of her completed play at the Theatre Guild of Ancon in Panama City on August 6, 2016, as a benefit for the Henry Foundation.

The play, which premiered a fully-staged production directed by the playwright at A Classic Theatre in St. Augustine in October of 2015, was the result of years' worth of research. "I was working with the archive at the University of Florida," Dickey recounts, "where I'd done work with my first play about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. One of the Deans happened to see when we did that production as a fundraiser for the United Way. She said 'Oh, you know they've just gotten the Panama Canal Museum Collection at the University and it's the 100th anniversary of the building of the Canal. Wouldn't it be nice if you wrote a play?' That's how it started and, actually, we were able to get a grant and backing from the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere, which is on campus, and several other groups supported it as well. And so I went into that archive and they gave me full access to these memoirs and wonderful images. They were actually still cataloguing things at that point. In fact, I remember when I first got there, there was a man from Louisiana who was sending all these pictures home to his grandfather who had been involved with the Panama Canal. So part of the grant was to do a reading at the Hippodrome in Gainesville, and then these ladies" - Dickey indicates Jean Rahner and Anne Kraft, President and Vice President, and Co-Founders of A Classic Theatre - "agreed to premiere the play here."

Nine months after the production in St. Augustine, Dickey and her husband were winging their way to Panama for a whirlwind rehearsal period, culminating in the August reading in Panama City. Dickey says, "It was a fabulous experience because there were people in the cast who had lived there all their lives and family who had worked on the Panama Canal. So I had West Indians and people who were descendants of West Indians. There was this woman, Ines, who published the Panama Tribune, which was the West Indian newspaper for a long time - she was the one I was most concerned about, how she would receive the material. But she had told my friend, Marcia, 'If you do this play' - she had read it about a year ago - 'I want to be a part of it.' So it validated a lot of the material. You know, I was doing research and I was asking questions, but until you talk to people who experienced it, it doesn't mean as much. Ines would quietly tell me things 'Well, actually ...' and what she was telling me were specifics, where I had written only generally. So we changed a few lines. You just knew she wanted me to understand the dignity of these people, the West Indians, that they came here because they wanted to work. Then she'd be very serious and I'd say 'Oh, I must be in trouble, because Ines is not smiling,' and she'd just give me a big bright beautiful smile. It's a unique experience to work with actors who have a vested history in what you're doing - they were all so committed."

A fortuitous meeting in a small Central American museum had brought two friends together who shared a passion for telling a story about the women who contributed to a major historical event - a philanthropist who had lived the history through her culture and a writer whose years of research led her to bring the history home to where it had happened a century before. Like the locks of the famed Canal, these two "kindred spirits" found a perfect synchronization in their friendship and goals through the profound impact of theatre.

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