Sheena Thompson
Communicator

Chautauqua began on the shores of a lake in Chautauqua, New York as a relaxing and educational retreat for scholars, ministers, politicians and musicians.

SFCC has adopted Chautauqua’s ideal of furthering education by presenting a forum of faculty members who dress up as historical figures and debate issues that were relevant to the time in which they lived. This year, the Chautauqua event was based on the campus-wide theme “Self-Creation: Defining Identity in a World of Info Overload.”

During the first day of the forum, Karl Marx, portrayed by Paul Lecoq, tried to convince other panelists and the audience to adopt his “communism-meets-utopian society” theories. Several times during the performance, Marx would interrupt the other speakers, and in a loud authoritative voice offered his end-all solution of “if you give up all of your property and your material items, we’ll all be equal!”

Booker T. Washington, impersonated by Gregory Roberts, spoke on the importance of equality for all.

“African-Americans will be influential in the processes necessary for every race to own property and be given the chance for higher education,” said Washington.

Seated next to Washington was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, represented by James Wilburn. Dr. King.

“Do to us what you will and we will still love you, we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and someday we will be free,” Dr. King said about the perseverance of African-Americans.

Alice Paul, a suffragist played by Penny Butters on day two of Chautauqua, scolded Gerald Murphy for mixing what appeared to be a martini while on stage. Murphy and his wife were artists who had an affinity for throwing parties and spent a significant amount of time socializing with the likes of Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso. Paul, however, explained that she had no time to party, instead, she was too busy fighting for women’s voting rights.

e.e. cummings, an American poet portrayed by Craig Rickett, also knew Picasso and Fitzgerald, but was famous for his poetry that contained odd typography and punctuation. He explained that he wrote his poetry to reflect his inner thoughts as he was writing each piece to give the reader a clear understanding of how to interpret the meaning of the poem.

Mark Doerr portrayed Edward R. Murrow, a Washington State University graduate and one of the first television news journalists. The media changed journalism, he said, because people wanted entertainment and it was his job to find out how to take a picture of an idea and put it on television.

Murrow, like Murphy, indulged his vice on stage by having a (prop) cigarette in his hand at all times. It was assumed that Murrow smoked about three packs of cigarettes a day, which is ironic because his show from the 1950’s, See It Now, was the first television show to explain to viewers the dangers of smoking – Murrow died of lung cancer.

The purpose of the - event was synonymous with the principle belief of the Chautauqua institute that everyone “has a right to be all that he can be – to know all that he can know.”

You can contact the writer at staffwriter@spokanefalls.edu