BWW Previews: StageOne Brings Ali's Origins to Stage with 'And In This Corner...Cassius Clay'

In 1954 in the west end of a highly segregated midwestern city, a 12-year-old boy's brand new red bike was stolen. The young boy was so livid that he was ready to fight someone - anyone. At a moment when he could have made a big mistake, a friendly neighborhood police officer steered the boy and his anger toward a gym across town, where he could do something constructive with it.

One small gesture for one boy was the first step toward creating a legend - the legend that is Muhammad Ali.

It was not an overnight journey. Ali, then just a young man known as Cassius Clay, Jr., put in six years of dedicated training with the support of the officer-turned-trainer Joe Martin and his family before becoming an Olympic champion. Four years later, he was a pro - and a world champion for the first of three times.

His legend is well-known. His early years, less so. That lack of a formative narrative led to a decision on the part of Peter Holloway and Andrew Harris to change that fact. Holloway, artistic director for Louisville's StageOne Family Theatre, and Harris, StageOne's associate artistic director, decided that Cassius Clay's story needed to be told.

Two years of work later, and StageOne brings "And In This Corner...Cassius Clay" to the Bomhard Theatre at the Kentucky Center for the Arts for its world premiere. The 75-minute journey, guided by Harris' directorial eye, traces Ali's journey from just prior to meeting Martin to the preparatory moments before his championship fight with Sonny Liston, which would launch him to worldwide superstardom. The latest project in StageOne's New Play Development Series will reach over 25,000 schoolchildren with a story that may well resonate with circumstances they face today - and open their eyes to possibilities they may never have imagined.

"And In This Corner" came from a planning discussion two years ago between Holloway and Harris about StageOne's upcoming seasons. StageOne has a long history of developing new scripts, but the effort had fallen off in recent years. Both Holloway and Harris are avid sports fans, and the conversation quickly turned to the hometown hero.

"Everybody knows Muhammad Ali," Harris said. "Love him or hate him, everybody has an opinion about Muhammad Ali. Not many people know the story, however, of Cassius Clay. They know 'The Champ.' They don't the young boy who went on to become the champ: Cassius Clay, a kid from the west end of Louisville, no different than the vast majority of kids who make up our audience. He's just like them - and look what happened to him. Look at the choices he made and what he was able to go on and do with his life. What a great story to tell. Not the global figure. The kid from Louisville."

With a concept in mind, Holloway and Harris set to finding the right person to craft the story. They received a recommendation from just down Main Street for Idris Goodwin, the award-winning playwright, essayist and spoken word artist whose "How We Got On," a dramatic ode to coming of age in the nascent years of Hip-Hop, had recently premiered at the 2012 Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre.

"Peter reached out to him through email, and it wasn't 20 minutes later, 30 minutes later, that he gets a response back from Idris, essentially saying 'Muhammad Ali is my hero. I love boxing. I love writing for young people. I'm in,'" Harris said.

StageOne partnered with Louisville's Muhammad Ali Center to give Goodwin an immersive experience of the Louisville of Clay's youth. Representatives took him to key spots on the "Ali tour," including Clay's boyhood home, the Presbyterian community center where he trained under Martin, and his high school. Goodwin interviewed residents who knew Ali and his brother Rudy, who plays a prominent supporting role in Goodwin's script.

"It was very immersive," Goodwin said. "I got to sense what it was like to be a young African American in Louisville beyond just the facts of his life. What was the feeling of this era? It was hugely informative and helped me shape the story.

"It's like an origin story," he said. "It was really fun because there's not a whole lot documented about that period of his life. And so the challenge became 'How do we mine his early days for inspiration, for dramatic possibilities?"

Goodwin began producing outlines and script drafts, collaborating with Harris and his creative team on the shape of the story, taking on the challenge of showing years of the young Clay's life and development and the forces that shaped him both in and outside the ring - in the scope of an hour and 15 minutes. Goodwin drew on his background in performance poetry and Hip-Hop to craft a mythic story with brevity in mind.

"In Chicago, I spent many years performing for young people. It wasn't a huge adjustment," he said. "The fundamentals are there - clarity of theme while take them on a journey. I think I generally have a very youthful spirit. The energy is always there. For me, it's always about energy and pace."

Goodwin credited the StageOne team with trusting him with the early stages of crafting the play. "I think they all knew the enormity of the challenge. This is a great Louisville son whose story is being told in Louisville. We were very careful (and) conscientious in creating something that honored the city and honored the man."

As the script evolved, Harris and his team were hard at work envisioning the story on the stage - and in the ring. "The entire show takes place in a gym - a couple of different ones. And this ring suddenly became this spectre that looms throughout the show, just sitting at the back of the theater," Harris said. "We only use it twice: in the fight with the neighborhood bully, Corky Baker, who several years older than the kids. Clay got him in the ring and beat him. He couldn't beat him on the streets, but in the ring, he could beat him. The only other time in ring is the Olympic fight against Zbigniew Pietrzykowski. Against Corky, he learns he can fight for others. That ring represents the path he's taking, and he gets into it at two very specific moments."

Goodwin and Harris also use dramatic economy to show in a pronounced way the forces shaping Clay's world outside the ring. Several childhood friends are blended into the character of Eddie, who finds himself swept into the struggle for civil rights, and challenges Clay on his lack of participation.

"Eddie challenges him as he's getting very focused on civil rights issues," Harris said. "Cassius says that's not for him. Eddie challenges him with one of the central questions of the play: 'There are two kinds of fighters in the world: those who fight for themselves, and those who fight for others. Who are you going to be?'"

"Who are you going to be?" was a question posed to Harris in a different context: casting the lead. As the script developed, he decided on looking for a single actor to portray Clay from ages 12 through 22. With the help of Zan Sawyer-Dailey of Actors Theatre, Harris and Holloway went beyond the local talent pool in a region-wide search. They landed in Chicago and met 26-year-old Justin Cornwell. Cornwell had the right look, talent and athleticism for the part - and brought some intangibles to the audition the crew had not expected. A Louisville native, Cornwell graduated from the University of Louisville and served on the student advisory board for the newly-founded Ali Center.

"It's crazy, really," Cornwell said. "Being so near his legacy is so well-ingrained in the minds of everybody. When the center went up, I was a council on the student board there. I volunteered there, painted a mural there. It's really come full circle as far as me and my relationship to Muhammad Ali's legacy. Being able to play him is really humbling."

"It was serendipity as much as anything," Harris said. "We thought, 'Things are meant to happen. Things are lining up, falling into place. We are meant to tell this story.'"

Cornwell said his lifelong familiarity with Ali served him well at his audition. "I had so much info since working at the center. I had seen all the fights already. He was my mom's biggest hero. He's been a part of my life since my life began. For the audition, I reflected back on all he had learned. I felt like I'd be able to do his accent pretty well. It kind of all fell into place."

But even with his background, Cornwell still found surprises in the role within Goodwin's script. "I didn't realize how much Louisville shaped him, and I don't think anybody did. That's the reason we're telling this particular story. It's not the spectacle that would become his life later on. It's more of the origin story."

"I jokingly called it 'Ali Begins,'" Goodwin said.

Working with Harris, Cornwell began unearthing the elements that would enable him to portray Clay's early days. "Before Liston, there was a lot more brashness, cockiness. He has a lot more energy and is really becoming that animated person. As a kid, he still is that animated person, and that cockiness and that brashness, those undertones are there for that. But they're not so much apparent. He has to gain the confidence through some of the things he does: through winning boxing matches, through fighting his neighborhood bullies, and overcoming the racial atmosphere of the time."

Aside from Clay's energy and other personality traits like his signature cadence, Cornwell set to work on learning the intricacies of in-ring combat. He focused on mastering Clay's footwork - his signature slides, his dances, and being able to feel his body in the movements.

"For the majority of the show, I'm still a young fighter training," he said. "It's only in the last fight that I ever really come to somewhat of a fruition of my skill. It's definitely one of those things where we wanted to not capture "Muhammad Ali," because people can look at a Muhammad Ali fight and say 'Oh, Muhammad Ali did that, Muhammad Ali did this,' but Muhammad Ali didn't do so many of those things before the Olympics in 1960. We really just wanted to tell the truth of his story and not just idolize him in a way that doesn't make him human. We kept the fighting really grounded as well."

It's in telling the grounded, down-to-earth story of a young man given a chance that Harris hopes to reach children seeing this chapter of Ali's story, presented for the first time.

"If (Joe Martin) is not there, who knows what path this boy takes? But there's this moment where these two found each other, and look what happened," Harris said. "I told the cast, 'You're going to have about 20,000 kids coming to see this show and have the opportunity to think 'That could be me.' That's a huge responsibility for you guys, because you have 20,000 chances to change somebody's life.' We all have the power to positively impact the world around us if we just decide we're going to."

"And In This Corner...Cassius Clay" runs through February 14. For more information, go to http://www.stageone.org/.

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