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Shackleford: Professor turns playwright

Posted on Mar 08, 2010 in Features

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Lee Shackleford, a UAB theater professor with an MFA from the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, recently wrote, directed, stage-managed and crewed “Crossing Lines.”

Performed on Feb. 18, the play focuses on the Birmingham and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW).

Based on actual events, the play centers on Eunice, a fictional character who travels to Birmingham to support the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

In the process, the audience becomes familiar with the purpose, results and very real participants in the Conference.
According to Shackleford, the play “was a commission from Vulcan Park and Museum, [as] part of their annual observance of Black History Month.”

The theme this year was Birmingham in the 1930s. As such, Shackleford and his colleagues thought the first convention of SCHW was a “perfect topic” because it was held in the Municipal Auditorium, which is now UAB’s own Boutwell Auditorium, from Nov. 30 until Dec. 2, 1938.

Shackleford stated that, “the SCHW was mandated by President Roosevelt as part of the New Deal, an attempt to solve the many, many problems posed by the nation’s most economically depressed area — which, contrary to popular belief, was the South. 

The SCHW was supposed to work out solutions to poverty, discrimination, corruption, and ignorance — a rather tall order.

The first convention was supposed to establish the Conference’s goals and get important like-minded people in touch with one another.”

Obviously, this Conference was a historic event in not only the history of Birmingham, but in the history of our country.
As such, it easily gained support from participants such as Eleanor Roosevelt, civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, and Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black.

The Conference gained huge amounts of media attention and was originally assembled after the new police chief “Bull Connor,” who, Shackleford states, would later become the “living symbol for segregation and bigotry,” began reinforcing segregation laws.

This play reaches deep into the checkered history of Birmingham. Shackleford has written a play that mixes the seriousness of the situation with humor.

“I always hope that people who see my plays leave convinced that serious and important topics can be effectively addressed through humor,” Shackleford said. “My plays are usually about important issues, but I try to approach those messages through quirky characters and snappy dialogue.”

“In the case of ‘Crossing Lines,’ there are only two characters,” he added, “so I wanted them to be as different from one another as possible and for each to be suspicious of the other’s attitudes and ideas. There’s a lot of humor that results from that, but the story’s key points are made along the way.”

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