"Black Book" Returns Collective Consciousness To Its Roots

Singleton (in baseball cap) and Ashford at a rehearsal Monday. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Mr. Ashford is having trouble convincing his class that debate is worth their time. In front of him, a handful of students look back, ready to question his every move. He adjusts his tie and takes a breath. It’s summer, and the room is sweltering. When he asks for their homework, the room crackles with an uncomfortable, shifting silence.

“Did y’all not do the homework,” he says, an edge to his voice. Another breath. “Look. Speaking is hard. Public speaking is the second biggest fear any human being has. But it’s necessary to know what your big why is.”

So unfolds Austin Dean Ashford’s Black Book, running May 10 through 25 at Collective Consciousness Theatre in the city's Fair Haven neighborhood. Devised, written, and performed by Ashford, the work tackles a surprising amount of ground in 80 minutes, including public education, anti-Black racism, gun control and a lack of mental health support in schools.

It is directed by CCT co-founder and Executive Artistic Director Dexter Singleton, with performances at Bregamos Community Theater at 491 Blatchley Ave. Tickets and more information are available here.

“It’s been a long time since CCT has done a solo show,” Singleton said in a phone call Tuesday morning. “Anyone who knows our roots knows that much of our early work was solo work. The show tackles education, which is an area that we haven't looked at for many seasons, along with gun control. I think it's a great show to end our season—we are coming back to social issues that really need our undivided attention.”

Those issues are woven deeply into Black Book, set in a universe that doesn’t feel so foreign to New Haven (Ashford grew up in Oakland and is based in Indianapolis, but the play is meant to be “any city U.S.A., Singleton said). In the play, it is summer, and Melvin Tolson High School has reached a boiling point. Outside the school, barbed wire greets students, blurring the line between prison industrial complex and public school. Inside, teachers are allowed to carry guns—and a sweet, brilliant Black boy named Vernon is dead because of it.

Enter a bright-eyed Mr. Ashford, a Wiley University grad and former Great Debater who has his work cut out for him. As he exhorts the power of debate, his students are hesitant, skeptical. That doesn’t mean they don’t have the knowledge: they weave in and out of poetry and rap, power and wit knitted into each sentence. They teach him a thing or two (or ten) about what it means to be human, bust stereotypes, and find Black joy in a year upturned by white supremacy.

Ashford: “I started with this question of, ‘What would happen if teachers had guns?’” he said. “I remember when Columbine was a crazy concept. Now, it’s so frequent. Schools are not the same safe place they used to be.”

They just operate in a culture of low expectations, which takes Ashford a minute to adjust to. While it is a one-man show, the playwright and actor voices 13 characters, giving voice to school administrators, teachers, and the young men who fill his classroom.  

“My real life story is very connected to this script,” Ashford said in a phone call Tuesday afternoon. “You realize that your actual story, that you actually live, is valuable enough.”

While Black Book is set in the present, its genesis began in the early 2000s, when Ashford fell in love with speech and debate for the first time. While he was finishing his GED, “I noticed that people on the [debate] team were getting scholarships” to college. It led him to Wiley, a historically Black university in Marshall, Texas that is home to the historic Great Debaters.

After seeing the eponymous film, he studied the rhetorical genius of Melvin B. Tolson, a writer and educator who founded the debate team at Wiley in the early 20th century. It inspired him to attend the school, where the actor Denzel Washington had relaunched the debate team with a $1 million gift in 2007. After years steeped in poetry and spoken word, Ashford soared, winning 21 national debate and speech championships in four years.

Meanwhile, Wiley instilled in him a new kind of pride in his Blackness—and a sense that there was a need to tell more stories like his. When he graduated in 2016, he didn't feel done with that narrative. 

Black Book gives him the chance to do just that. After college, Ashford enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Arkansas, where he met Singleton during the 2018 Arkansas New Play Festival. After starting with just a “handful of pages,” he wrote furiously, finishing a 60-page script in roughly a week. He let a single question, informed by years of studying in the South, guide him.

“I started with this question of, ‘What would happen if teachers had guns?’” he said. “I remember when Columbine was a crazy concept. Now, it’s so frequent. Schools are not the same safe place they used to be.”

“We’re really hearing what adults think about this situation, but no one’s asking students,” he added. As a teaching artist, “you feel a sense of having to be a protector. It’s tough to feel so helpless. They tell you to block the door—what if someone shoots through the door?”

And what if the threat is coming from a burnt-out or biased educator inside the school?

That’s where Black Book begins, in the aftermath of Vernon’s murder at the hands of an armed teacher. In the classroom, Ashford’s students are traumatized—but they also want to talk about what happened, and it seems like no one is asking them. Their story is there between the silences, when they read poems about their origins as kings, dip in and out of Black history, flow into extemporaneous rap, and remember their fallen friend with elegiac grace.

As Ashford shape-shifts in and out of character, embodying several of these young people, it’s as effective as it is affecting. In one scene, he voices his students Greg and Daniel, slipping into a spoken word piece that Vernon wrote before he was killed. As he jumps between a falsetto and a bass, a listener can imagine two boys at the front of a class, performing for their peers.

“Our crowns are haloes with Black jewels of knowledge!” he exclaims in a bright, high pitch, and suddenly there is a joyful teen somewhere in the room, so familiar it seems that the audience may know him.

Just as quickly, Ashford becomes another of his students, dropping bars as he thumps his chest and snaps for a beat. “Why bruh/Why?” the student asks aloud. “Why why/Why?/Why we gotta listen to you talk?/Why we gotta put on a suit?/Why?/Why I gotta—/Why I gotta act all good/Why I get misunderstood?”

These voices, mixed with Ashford’s own, make every word worth hanging on to. Around the playwright, a set remains fairly minimal: there is a tired-looking American flag, clean whiteboard with a single photo tacked to it, a desk at which Ashford sits with a cup of Starbucks coffee and an open laptop. The rest unfolds as he jumps from one scene to the next.

What comes out of it is an argument about which lives are considered human, about who deserves to simply survive and who deserves to flourish. In the audience, people can see what these young men are up against—not just an underfunded district and kids who are consistently underestimated, but also teachers who struggle with bias and conflict, alarmingly quick to pull a trigger when given the chance.

It's a conversation that Ashford wants his audience to have, he said. During a rehearsal Monday afternoon, he ran through lines as Singleton looked on, jotting down notes. Between gentle teasing (“You sound like you from Oakland!”) and brief edits to the script, the two debated how best to describe Vernon’s murder at the hands of a teacher.

Was “shot in the face” more realistic than “shot in the temple,” Singleton asked plainly. What about “Shot in the head?” It drove home the weight of the show like a ton of bricks.

While Black Book is often heavy, it is also a play about the necessity of Black joy and Black storytelling, and of having a childhood free of violence, stereotype, and dominant narrative. Ashford’s students are not academic slouches: they are just finding their own way to the material, and they are full of heart and brilliance while they do it. It’s up to the audience to see how that shines through.

As it comes to CCT, it could not be more timely. When Singleton first booked the show in 2020, he could not have known that a pandemic would test the mental health of students and teachers, that educators would leave their classrooms en masse, the Tennessee legislature would be voting on whether to arm teachers in the classroom, a measure that passed into law at the end of April, as recently as this year.

Indeed in three years of postponements, he watched the country have the same debate. In 2022, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine passed a law allowing teachers to carry  weapons in schools. The following year, Texas proposed and passed legislation that put armed personnel on school campuses. Currently, teachers have some allowance to carry guns in over 50 percent of the U.S. (see a map here). And at the same time, schools remain underfunded and underresourced, particularly in Black and Brown neighborhoods.

In that sense, Ashford has hit on something uniquely American, where firearms have more rights than students, and a school may name itself after a historical Black figure, and then fail the students of color within its walls (how many underfunded public schools are named after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ida B. Wells?). For both him and for Singleton, there’s the chance for dialogue there.

“I think it's something as a country we all need to be aware of and stay informed and really know where we stand,” Singleton said. As an educator, he’s spent time teaching in Fairfield, mentoring students who were affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “Education, gun violence, gun control—it truly affects everyone.”

Black Book runs May 10-25 at Bregamos Community Theatre, 491 Blatchley Ave. in New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood. Tickets and more information are available here.