Documentary Follows Transformative School Production of The Color Imperial

LOGAN CYRUS
Northwest School of the Arts instructor Corey Mitchell is one of the top theater instructors in the country, every bit evidenced by his recent Tony award for theater educational activity.

BRITANY BOWENSwalked into the audition room at Northwest School of the Arts five years ago looking similar a nervous 18-year-old. But when she recited a monologue from The Color Purple, something changed. Her tone hardened, and her eyes locked on an invisible enemy. "All my life, I had to fight," she said as the character Sofia. "I had to fight my daddy, I had to fight my brothers, my uncles, and my cousins, likewise. But I never, never, never, never thought I would take to fight in my own house."

This was the spring of 2012, and Bowens was a sophomore at Northwest, taking another shot at high school (her mother pulled her out of W Mecklenburg High School in 2009, and she attended Due east Mecklenburg in 2011). Her family lived in a hotel room, where she shared a bed with two siblings. Theater was her escape, and Northwest was her oasis. "No matter what I looked similar, what I wore, what I smelled like—it was a place where anybody can be themselves," she says now.

Yet her time was express. North Carolina public schools are required only to brainwash students until they're 21, and Bowens wasn't sure how many more chances she'd accept to perform at Northwest. She was determined to exist cast in The Color Purple. "I need to do this now," Bowens thought that twenty-four hours, "or I'm never gonna exercise it."

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BRIDGET LARKIN

Northwest School of the Arts was the 2nd high schoolhouse in America to perform the original Broadway production of the musical.

NORTHWEST WAS the 2nd loftier school in the country to perform the original Broadway production of Alice Walker's novel-turned-musical—and did it with an nearly entirely blackness cast. Theater instructor Corey Mitchell hoped the students would have the production all the way to an international student theater festival in Nebraska. He fifty-fifty invited a local moving picture coiffure to document the process.

Joanne Hock of GreyHawk Films thought she was gathering footage for a possible reality prove, but months of following the cast members turned into iv years. Purple Dreams became a full-length documentary that Hock hopes volition be released on the festival circuit this winter. It provides an intimate portrait of the students equally they grow upward on-screen. "In a fashion, their lives mirror a piddling bit virtually what was going on in the prove," Hock says.

The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a young black woman in rural Georgia in the early on 1900s who is violently abused by her stepfather and her husband. Over fourth dimension, she evolves from a scared teenager into a adult female of formidable forcefulness. She leaves her husband, falls in love with a woman, and starts a clothing business. Her journey to independence helps heal the lives of those effectually her—including her calumniating husband. When they reach old age, both are kinder, wiser, stronger people.

Mitchell, who has taught at Northwest for near xx years, remembers reading the novel when he was in 10th class, sitting in school with it hidden within his anatomy textbook. "That was one (book) that had me absolutely riveted," he says now. "Doing that show became a mission."

Many of the students he cast in the musical felt the aforementioned way. Bowens' family is from Wadesboro, Due north Carolina, nigh where Steven Spielberg filmed his version of The Colour Purple in the early 1980s. Bowens' mother and aunt auditioned to be extras in the movie, but were told their skin was not dark enough. At Northwest, Bowens was thrilled just to exist in the chorus. As she says in the documentary: "I would be a flooring piece in the show. I simply want to be in it."

Mekhai Lee, who was in 11th grade at Northwest when he played Celie's married man, Mister, says it was a script he could "put my whole heart into." It was besides the start time he had performed in a prove that was not written for white actors.

"Sometimes, it is important to tell a story that is theirs," Mitchell says.

Northwest, a magnet schoolhouse on Beatties Ford Road, has long been what Mitchell calls an "island of misfit toys" for artistic students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. 1 of its most famous recent alumni, Eva Noblezada, will star in Miss Saigon on Broadway this March. Only at the fourth dimension Mitchell held his auditions, the school was in transition. Principal Barry Bowe died past suicide in January 2012, and his successor, Melody Sears, knew the kids needed emotional back up. Last year, 47 percent of the students were identified as "economically disadvantaged."

"One of the reasons that I came to Northwest is because they told me, 'They demand a female parent,'" Sears says in the motion picture.

The cast staged The Colour Purple at breakneck speed, rehearsing for roughly two weeks in August 2012 before performing the show in early on September. This wasn't easy. Lee walked a mile and one-half and took 2 buses to attend schoolhouse every morn, then stayed late to rehearse when classes ended. The family of another cast fellow member, Phillip Johnson-Richardson, was homeless at the time, and he was sleeping on his grandmother's flooring.

Mitchell's mother was hospitalized for spinal surgery just as the students were virtually to perform the play. One morning, the theater teacher found himself crying in the master'southward function at Northwest, worried that he would lose his mom. That afternoon at rehearsal, the students behaved terribly, Mitchell recalls. "My mom is dying and you guys are killing me within," he told them.
Immediately, the antics stopped. The cast gathered in a circle to pray.

When the lights finally went upwardly afterwards the first Saturday evening performance of The Color Purple, audience members rose to their feet and grown men cried, Bowens recalls.

The next summer, members of the cast and crew were invited to perform at the highly competitive International Thespian Festival at the Academy of Nebraska. No school from North Carolina had performed on the festival's main phase in 30 years. They raised more than than $170,000 to fund the cantankerous-land trip. Lee and Johnson-Richardson auditioned for college recruiters at the festival. Bowens didn't have the grades to audience, Hock says, only at Mitchell'southward urging, she introduced herself to recruiters anyway. St. Mary's Academy of Minnesota offered her a scholarship on the spot. Suddenly, the teenager who had once dropped out of high school had a manner to pay for higher.

She studied musical theater at St. Mary'southward for a year and a half, only found she wasn't entirely happy. The operation schedule was exhausting, and sophomore year, she took a suspension from theater to rest, written report, and volunteer. She discovered the options outside of her major were limited on the small-scale campus. "As a blackness student on the predominantly white campus, I didn't feel like my potential could exist maximized," she says.

So, last jump, her favorite aunt was injured in a bad auto accident. Bowens returned to Charlotte for three weeks to visit her aunt in the hospital and help her family unit. When she went back to Minnesota, she didn't feel she had the support she needed to stay in school.

"This was by far the worst affair I've e'er gone through in my life," she says of the blow. "Information technology gave me a reason to leave."

Now 23, she's working about Raleigh and has been accepted at Virginia State University. If her fiscal aid package comes through, she plans to transfer there and written report mass communications. Bowens decided she'd rather pursue a career in radio or voice-over work than theater. "My goal now is to terminate school," she says.

Her former cast-mates are all the same in the spotlight. Lee is a theater major at UNC School of the Arts, and Johnson-Richardson attends the University of Cincinnati Higher-Conservatory of Music. Mitchell even so teaches at Northwest. In 2015, after his friends at GreyHawk films helped nominate him, he won the first Tony award always given for theater teaching. And tardily in 2016, he learned he was a semifinalist for the Yarkey Foundation's Global Instructor Prize, which comes with a prize of $100,000 a year for 10 years—so long as the winner remains in the classroom at to the lowest degree five years. He'll learn whether he's 1 of the 10 finalists from around of globe this calendar month.

Bowens keeps in bear upon with her friends from Northwest, and holds onto the lessons she learned at that place. "As long as I requite 100 percent," she says, "100 per centum will come back to me."

Lisa Rab is a Politician Mag correspondent and erstwhile articles editor for this mag. Reach her lisayrab@gmail.com or on Twitter: @lisayrab.