BACKSTAGE · THE SPITFIRE GRILL BACKSTAGE GUIDE 5 The Spitfire Grill began as a 1996 film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff — a filmmaker best known as the creator of the

THE SPITFIRE GRILL BACKSTAGE GUIDE 1

BACKSTAGE

A publication of COMMUNITY SERVICE at

AMERICAN BLUES THEATER

2 AMERICAN BLUES THEATER

BACKSTAGE

THE SPITFIRE GRILL Book by James Valcq & Fred Alley

Lyrics by Fred Alley Music by James Valcq

Directed by Tammy Mader Music direction by Malcolm Ruhl

A feisty parolee follows her dreams, based on a page from an old travel book, to a small town in Wisconsin and finds a place for herself working at Hannah’s Spitfire Grill. The New York Times calls this script “a soul satisfying…work of theatrical resourcefulness” and The Wall Street Journal heralds its “soaring melodies”.

* Ensemble member of American Blues Theater

STARRING

Gabrielle Lott-Rogers Jacquelyne Jones

Dara Cameron*

Catherine Smitko

Donterrio Johnson Karl Hamilton Ian Paul Custer*


Note from Artistic Director Gwendolyn Whiteside ..............................................................................Page 4

About The Spitfire Grill .........................................................................................................................Page 5

About the Writers ................................................................................................................................Page 5

Interview with Music Director Malcolm Ruhl ......................................................................................Page 6

Sketches from Costume Designer Lily Grace Walls ..............................................................................Page 7

About Women’s Mass Incarceration ...............................................................................................Pages 8-9

Unemployment Among Formerly Incarcerated People ..............................................................Pages 10-11

“The Hard Truths of Trying to ’Save’ The Rural Economy” .........................................................Pages 12-13

About Vietnam Deserters ............................................................................................................Pages 14-15

About American Blues Theater ...................................................................................................Pages 16-17

BACKSTAGE

Elyse Dolan Associate Producer American Blues Theater with Gwendolyn Whiteside, Malcolm Ruhl, and Lily Grace Walls

© 2019 American Blues Theater. All rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


Welcome to the final production of American Blues Theater’s Season 33 “Home Sweet Home”. We proudly present James Valcq and Fred Alley’s The Spitfire Grill – a musical, based on the film by Lee David Zlotoff. We’re thrilled to reteam longtime collaborators Tammy Mader and Malcolm Ruhl on this project. Malcolm has been involved with American Blues from before our rebirth in 2009. His recent work at Blues includes award-winning musicals Hank Williams: Lost Highway (music direction), Little Shop of Horrors (musician), and Buddy – The Buddy Holly Story (music consultant). After many male-driven musicals, we wanted to showcase strong female characters and voices, particularly in today’s state of declining women’s rights and equity. In addition, these gorgeous songs and rich folk music offer a needed respite from the 24-hour news cycle, constant alerts, alarms, and notifications. For a short while, you’ll

receive a break from the fast-paced world as you enter this small town. The Spitfire Grill cooks up a recipe of judgment, forgiveness, and redemption. The dessert is a warm helping of self-reflection. What is your moral code? How do you begin anew? Where do you go to rejuvenate? Our heroine Percy Talbott claims, while looking into the lush Wisconsin scenery, “…the only woods I ever saw was in magazines and picture books. But this is better than any picture.” Humankind has always communed with nature though the frequency is waning. In Japanese culture, there is a therapy shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing”. What was once considered commonplace – a walk amongst trees – has now become prescriptive to combat daily stress of the modern era. The proverbial sniff of the roses no longer cuts it. Sometime before the summer cools and the sun sets, treat yourself to a little self-care walk amongst the trees. Perhaps a few bars from this score will accompany your steps and lift your spirit.

Artistic Director Gwendolyn Whiteside

NOTE FROM ARTISTIC DIRECTOR GWENDOLYN WHITESIDE

Artistic Director Gwendolyn Whiteside addresses the crowd at the 2015 Ripped: The Living Newspaper Festival


The Spitfire Grill began as a 1996 film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff — a filmmaker best known as the creator of the TV series MacGyver. The idea for the film was conceived by Malcolm Roger Courts, long-time Director and CEO of Sacred Heart League, Inc., a Roman Catholic nonprofit fundraising and communications organization based in Mississippi. With private financing from Sacred Heart League, the film was shot in Vermont in 1995. It was submitted to the Sundance Film Festival and was accepted for screening at the 1996 festival. During one sold-out festival screening, a representative of Castle Rock Entertainment viewed the film and contacted her superiors, who offered $10 million for the film's rights. Profits from the sale of the film were used to construct a grade school for 450 children in Southaven, Mississippi.

Long-time friends James Valcq and Fred Alley wanted to create a piece of populist theatre with elements of myth and folktale. Upon seeing the film The Spitfire Grill, they had found their vehicle. In November 2000, the musical adaption of The Spitfire Grill premiered at George Street Playhouse in New Jersey. Throughout the process, Arthur Laurents mentored the creative team, encouraging them to find their own emotional truth in the material.

The Spitfire Grill began performances off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon on September 7, 2011. The musical went on to win the Richard Rodgers Production Award and received Best Musical nominations from the Outer Critics Circle and Drama League, as well as two Drama Desk nominations. It has gone on to be produced over 500 times worldwide in regional theatres, community theatres, and school productions.

ABOUT THE SPITFIRE GRILL

ABOUT THE MUSICAL’S WRITERS James Valcq (Composer/librettist) Prior to The Spitfire Grill, Valcq was the composer/author of Zombies from The Beyond, which opened Off-Broadway to critical acclaim in 1995. Other New York credits include Fallout Follies at the York Theatre, Songs I Never Sang For My Father at the Village Theatre, and The Last Leaf. He holds an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to musicals, Valcq has composed song cycles and choral pieces which have been performed in the U.S. and Europe.

Fred Alley (Lyricist/librettist) was the co-founder and Artist in Residence at American Folklore Theatre (AFT) in Door County, Wisconsin. It was at AFT that he first collaborated with James Valcq on The Passage, a new musical. Alley was also the librettist and lyricist of the musicals Guys on Ice, Lumberjacks in Love, and The Bachelors, all of which set box office records at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Fred Alley died unexpectedly following a heart attack in May 2001.

The poster for the film version of The Spitfire Grill (1996)

Writers Fred Alley and James Valcq

(edited from Wikipedia.org, PlaywrightsHorizons.org, and TheSpitfireGrill.com)


INTERVIEW WITH MUSIC DIRECTOR MALCOLM RUHL

Associate Producer Elyse Dolan discusses The Spitfire Grill with Music Director Malcolm Ruhl.

What excites you about working on this project? I’m excited to be working with one of my favorite theater companies and one of my favorite directors. This will be the sixth project that Tammy Mader and I have worked on together. Having that kind of collaborative history is an invaluable asset. We know each other’s musical and theatrical sensibilities, and approaches to the production process. I am more at home working on smaller, intimate productions, where the performers are close to the audience. This is one of the things I love about working with American Blues Theater, and it’s something that enhances the story of The Spitfire Grill. Though I think the music fits squarely into contemporary chamber musical theater styles, the Spitfire melodies, harmonies, musical textures, and instrumentation (guitar, accordion, violin, cello and piano) are also clearly inspired by Midwestern and Appalachian rural folk music traditions.

What are the duties of a music director? This sounds like an oversimplified answer, but above all, it is to make sure the music sounds good. That means ensuring that the audience can clearly hear and understand the lyrics, while balancing the compositional artistry of the musical story-telling and the orchestrations. Having a good working relationship with the sound designer is crucial. My job starts with the casting process, which I consider to be the most important part of the gig. If you get that right, the rest is about making art. Beyond that, my responsibilities include the oversight of all things musical, providing direction and support to the singers and instrumentalists, in rehearsals and, for this production, in performance. (I am conducting and playing the accordion.)

What is your vision for the music/sound of this production? The music helps to set the story’s time and place. Many of The Spitfire Grill songs have elements that to my ear evoke folk/pop singer-songwriters of the 1970’s and early 1980’s. I want the acoustic ambience of the instrumentation to take the audience to the woods that surround Gilead, staying true to the musical notes that composer James Valcq set down on the page, while making sure that the voices of the small-town characters ring true for the audience.

What will you be working on next? I am currently working on rewrites and recordings for an original musical, Cicada Dance. In the fall, I will return to Goodman Theatre for my 15th season of A Christmas Carol, as an actor/musician and musical director.

Music Director Malcolm Ruhl

INTERVIEW WITH MUSIC DIRECTOR MALCOLM RUHL


BEHIND THE SCENES WITH DESIGNER SARAH E. ROSS

Costume Designer Lily Grace Walls shares her preliminary designs for a few of the characters of The Spitfire Grill.

SKETCHES FROM COSTUME DESIGNER LILY GRACE WALLS


With growing public attention to the problem of mass incarceration, people want to know about women’s experience with incarceration. How many women are held in prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities in the United States? And why are they there? While these are important questions, finding those answers requires not only disentangling the country’s decentralized and overlapping criminal justice systems, but also unearthing the frustratingly hard to find and often altogether missing data on gender.

This report provides a first-of-its-kind detailed view of the 219,000 women incarcerated in the United States, and how they fit into the even larger picture of correctional

control. We break the data down to show the various correctional systems that control women, and to examine why women are locked up.

In stark contrast to the total incarcerated population, where the state prison systems hold twice as many people as are held in jails, incarcerated women are nearly evenly split between state prisons and local jails. The explanation for exactly what happened, when, and why does not yet exist because the data on women has long been obscured by the larger picture of men’s incarceration. The disaggregated numbers presented here are an important first step to ensuring that women are not left behind in the effort to end mass incarceration.

ABOUT WOMEN’S MASS INCARCERATION

In The Spitfire Grill, “Percy” is newly released from prison. The below chart and article—edited here for length—from the ACLU and the Prison Policy Initiative examines the data regarding incarcerated women in the United States as of 2017.


Women are disproportionately stuck in jails A staggering number of women who are incarcerated are not even convicted: more than a quarter of women who are behind bars have not yet had a trial.

Avoiding pre-trial incarceration is uniquely challenging for women. The number of unconvicted women stuck in jail is surely not because courts are considering women—who are generally the primary caregivers of children—to be a flight risk. The far more likely answer is that incarcerated women—who have lower incomes than incarcerated men—have an even harder time affording cash bail. A previous study found that women who could not make bail had an annual median income of just $11,071. And among those women, Black women had a median annual income of only $9,083 (just 20% that of a white non-incarcerated man). When the typical $10,000 bail amounts to a full year’s income, it’s no wonder that women are stuck in jail awaiting trial.

Even once convicted, the system funnels women into jails: About a quarter of convicted incarcerated women are held in jails, compared to about 10% of all people incarcerated with a conviction.

So what does it mean that large numbers of women are held in jail - for them, and for their families? While stays in jail are generally shorter than in stays in prison, jails make it harder to stay in touch with family than prisons do. Phone calls are more expensive—up to $1.50 per minute—and other forms of communication are more restricted - some jails don’t even allow real letters, limiting mail to postcards. This is especially troubling given that 80% of women in jails are mothers, and most of them are primary caretakers of their children. Thus children are particularly susceptible to the domino effect of burdens placed on incarcerated women.

Women in jails are also more likely to suffer from mental health problems and experience serious psychological distress than either women in prisons or men in either correctional setting.

Ending mass incarceration requires looking at all offenses The numbers revealed by this report enable a national conversation about the policies that impact incarcerated women held in various facilities, and also serve as the foundation for discussions to change the policies that lead to incarcerating women in the first place.

All too often, the conversation about criminal justice reform starts and stops with the question of non-violent drug and property offenses. While drug and property offenses make up more than half of the offenses for which women are incarcerated, the chart reveals that all offenses—including violent offenses that account for roughly a quarter of all incarcerated women—must be considered in the effort to reduce the number of incarcerated women in this country. This new data on women underlines the need for reform discussions to focus not just on the easier choices but on choices that can lead to impactful policy changes.

The tentacles of mass incarceration have a long reach The chart here represents just one small portion (16%) of the women under correctional supervision. Again, this is in stark contrast to the general incarcerated population (mostly men), where a full third of those under correctional control are in prisons and jails.

Three out of four women under control of the correctional systems are on probation. Probation is often billed as an alternative to incarceration, but instead it is frequently set with unrealistic conditions that undermine its goal of keeping people from being locked up. For example, probation often comes with steep fees, which, like bail, women are in the worst position to afford. Failing to pay these probation fees is often a violation of probation. Childcare duties further complicate probation requirements that might require meetings with probation officers, with no extra money to spend on babysitters or reliable fast transportation across town. All of these issues make women particularly vulnerable to being incarcerated not because they commit crimes, but because they ran afoul of one of the burdensome obligations of their probation supervision.

The picture of women’s incarceration is far from complete, and many questions remain about mass incarceration’s unique impact on women. Based on our analysis in this report we know that a quarter of incarcerated women are unconvicted. But is that number growing? And how does that undue incarceration load intersect with women’s disproportionate caregiving burdens to impact families?

While more data is needed, the data in this report lends focus and perspective to the policy changes needed to end mass incarceration without leaving women behind.


Over 600,000 people make the difficult transition from prisons to the community each year and although there are many challenges in the transition, the roadblocks to securing a job have particularly severe consequences. Employment helps formerly incarcerated people gain economic stability after release and reduces the likelihood that they return to prison, promoting greater public safety to the benefit of everyone. But despite the overwhelming benefits of employment, people who have been to prison are largely shut out of the labor market.

Using a nationally representative dataset, we provide the first-ever estimate of unemployment among the 5 million formerly incarcerated people living in the United States. Our analysis shows that formerly incarcerated people are unemployed at a rate of over 27%—higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression.

Our estimate of the unemployment rate establishes that formerly incarcerated people want to work, but face structural barriers to securing employment, particularly within the period immediately following release. For those who are Black or Hispanic—especially women—status as “formerly incarcerated” reduces their employment

chances even more. This perpetual labor market punishment creates a counterproductive system of release and poverty, hurting everyone involved: employers, the taxpayers, and certainly formerly incarcerated people looking to break the cycle.

Prior research suggests that employers discriminate against those with criminal records, even if they claim not to. Although employers express willingness to hire people with criminal records, evidence shows that having a record reduces employer callback rates by 50%. What employers say appears to contradict what they actually do when it comes to hiring decisions.

Our analysis also shows that formerly incarcerated people are more likely to be “active” in the labor market than the general public. Among 25-44 year old formerly incarcerated people, 93.3% are either employed or actively looking for work, compared to 83.8% among their general population peers of similar ages.

Though unemployment among formerly incarcerated people is five times higher than among the general public, these results show that they want to work. Unemployment among this population is a matter of public will, policy, and practice, not differences in aspirations.

UNEMPLOYMENT AMONG FORMERLY INCARCERATED PEOPLE

In The Spitfire Grill “Percy” is able to get a job at the local diner, but many formerly incarcerated people in the United States struggle to find work. This article from the Prison Policy Initiative—edited here for length—takes a closer look at these issues.


people recently released from prison receive an income that puts them well below the poverty line.

Our data suggests that, in combination with a criminal record, race and gender play a significant role in shaping who gets access to good jobs and livable incomes. Almost all employed formerly incarcerated white men (the group most likely to be employed) work in full-time positions, whereas Black women (the group least likely to be employed) are overrepresented in part-time and occasional jobs.

Conclusion One of the primary concerns for people being released from prison is finding a job. Exclusionary policies and practices—not individual-level failings of criminalized people—are responsible for these labor market inequalities. Fortunately, research shows that those with prior criminal justice system contact want to work and that hiring them can benefit both employers and the general public. For instance, a study of job performance among call center employees found that individuals with criminal records had longer tenure and were less likely to quit than those without records.

The evidence illustrates that broad stereotypes about people with criminal records have no real-world basis, but convincing employers that people with criminal records are good workers is not enough. Improving the wellbeing of formerly incarcerated people will also require policy efforts that address the underlying structural sources of inequality impacting criminalized people across the United States.

Race and gender In the general public, people of color tend to face higher unemployment rates than whites, while men tend to have lower unemployment rates than women. The overrepresentation of people of color and men among those who have been to prison, then, could have conceivably influenced the inequalities we observed between formerly incarcerated people and the general public. After disaggregating by race and gender, however, we found that the unemployment rate of every formerly incarcerated group remains higher than that of any comparable group in the general public. High unemployment among formerly incarcerated people is not simply explained by the overrepresentation of people of color in the criminal justice system; it’s the status of being formerly incarcerated that sets them apart.

But the story here is intersectional. Formerly incarcerated Black women in particular experience severe levels of unemployment, whereas white men experience the lowest. Overall, we see working-age “prison penalties” that increase unemployment rates anywhere from 14 percentage points (for white men) to 37 percentage points (for Black women) when compared to their general population peers. Our findings mirror prior research establishing that both race and gender shape the economic stability of criminalized people.

Access to full-time work When formerly incarcerated people do land jobs, they are often the most insecure and lowest-paying positions. According to an analysis of IRS data by the Brookings Institution, the majority of employed


There are 60 million people—almost one in five Americans—living on farms, in hamlets, and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline.

This is, of course, not news to the people who live in rural and small-town America, who have been fighting for years to reverse this decline. But now, the nation’s political class is finally noticing. The election of Donald Trump, powered in no small degree by rural voters, has brought the troubles of small-town America to national attention, with an urgent question: What can be done to revive it?

Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena.

Rural communities once captured a greater share of the nation’s prosperity. Jobs and wages in small town America played catch-up with big cities until the mid 1980s. During the economic recovery of 1992 to 1996, 135,000 new businesses were started in small counties, a third of the nation’s total. Employment in small counties shot up by

2.5 million, or 16 percent, twice the pace experienced in counties with million-plus populations.

These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer.

States, municipalities and the federal government have spent billions to draw jobs and prosperity to stagnant rural areas. But they haven’t yet figured out how to hitch this vast swath of the country to the tech-heavy economy that is flourishing in America’s cities.

After World War II, small town prosperity relied on its contribution to the industrial economy. The census considers Price County, WI to be 100 percent rural. Still, over a third of the jobs there are in manufacturing, from building industrial machines to assembling trucks. Overall, manufacturing employs about one in eight workers in the country’s 704 entirely rural counties. That’s more than agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining combined and second only to education, health care, and social assistance, which includes teachers, doctors, nurses, and social service counselors. Most of those jobs are government funded.

THE HARD TRUTHS OF TRYING TO “SAVE” THE RURAL ECONOMY

The Spitfire Grill is set in a small town in Wisconsin where the local quarry has recently closed, leaving many out-of-work. The below article from The New York Times—edited here for length—examines the state of rural economies across the country.

An abandoned quarry in Wisconsin. Photo by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.


But factory jobs can no longer keep small-town America afloat. Even after a robust eight-year growth spell, there are fewer than 13 million workers in manufacturing across the entire economy. Robots and workers in China put together most of the manufactured goods that Americans buy, and the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in small towns.

Consider Lake County, in Tennessee. Some 7,500 people live there, about 500 fewer than in 2000. Lake County is betting on a new industrial park on Cates Landing on the Mississippi River. But it will be tough to reverse years of declining employment. Between 2013 and 2017, the county averaged fewer than 250 manufacturing jobs, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That’s half as many as it had in 2000.

What to do? Since the presidential election in 2016, when small town voters enthusiastically endorsed the populist campaign of President Trump, policymakers and academics have thrown themselves at understanding the economic backdrop to their frustrations. They have come up with no shortage of proposals for how to turn rural America around, from offering a tax credit for employers that hire workers in distressed communities to designing investment funds to draw venture capital into rural areas.

[However, there is] the inescapable reality of agglomeration, one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the last three decades. Innovative companies choose to locate where other successful, innovative companies are. That’s where they can find lots of highly skilled workers. The more densely packed these pools of talent are, the more workers can

learn from each other and the more productive they become. This dynamic feeds on itself, drawing more high-tech firms and highly skilled workers to where they already are.

In hindsight, no amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens, which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country. If even medium-sized cities find it difficult to compete, what are the odds that, say, a small town like Amory, MS, where 14 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree and a quarter of its 2,500 workers work in small-scale manufacturing, have a chance to attract well-paid tech jobs?

There are, to be sure, some rural communities with productivity as high as some big cities. But they rely on heavily mechanized and automated industries that support few jobs: oil extraction or large-scale agriculture, in which tractors talk to satellites and no drivers are involved. Excluding these places, the United States is still left with 50 to 55 million people living in rural communities that no longer have much to offer them economically.

Still, there are compelling reasons to try to help rural economies rebound. What’s more, the costs of rural poverty are looming over American society. Think of the opioid addiction taking over rural America, of the spike in crime, of the wasted human resources in places where only a third of adults hold a job.

The distress of 50 million Americans should concern everyone. Powerful economic forces are arrayed against rural America and, so far, efforts to turn it around have failed. Not every small town can be a tech hub, nor should it be. But that can’t be the only answer.

A working farm in Pennsylvania.


In military terminology, desertion is the abandonment of a duty or post without permission (a pass, liberty or leave) and is done with the intention of not returning. In contrast, unauthorized absence (UA) or absence without leave (AWOL) refers to a temporary absence.

In the United States Army, military personnel will become "AWOL" if absent from their post without a valid pass, liberty or leave. The United States Marine Corps, United States Navy, and United States Coast Guard generally refer to this as "unauthorized absence" or "UA". Personnel are dropped from their unit rolls after thirty days and then listed as deserters; however, as a matter of U.S. military law, desertion is not measured by time away from the unit, but rather:

• by leaving or remaining absent from their unit, organization, or place of duty, where there has been a determined intent to not return;

• if that intent is determined to be to avoid hazardous duty or shirk contractual obligation;

• if they enlist or accept an appointment in the same or another branch of service without disclosing the fact that they have not been properly separated from current service.

People who are away for more than thirty days but return voluntarily or indicate a credible intent to return may still be considered AWOL. Those who are away for fewer than thirty days but can credibly be shown to have no intent to return (for example, by joining the armed forces of another country) may nevertheless be tried

ABOUT VIETNAM DESERTERS

A character in The Spitfire Grill is revealed to have been a Vietnam deserter. Below is more information about the difference between desertion and absence without leave, and about President Ford’s conditional amnesty for Vietnam deserters.

Soldiers in Vietnam in 1970.


for desertion. On rare occasions, they may be tried for treason if enough evidence is found.

Thousands of American servicemen deserted during the Vietnam War. Canada and other countries gave asylum to deserted U.S. soldiers. For example, Sweden allows asylum for foreign soldiers deserting from war, if the war does not align with the current goals of Swedish foreign policy.

President Gerald Ford, a World War II veteran, issued a conditional amnesty on September 16, 1974 to members of the Armed Forces who had deserted during the Vietnam War. To qualify, the president announced, they needed to work for up to two years in a public service job.

Ford said he wanted the nation to move beyond the war, which had cost more than 58,000 American lives and had long divided the country.

He noted in his proclamation that “desertion in time of war is a major, serious offense.” For that matter, he added, draft evasion “is also a serious offense. Such actions, he said, needn’t be condoned. “Yet,” he continued, “reconciliation calls for an act of mercy to bind the nation’s wounds and to heal the scars of divisiveness.”

Ford announced that “each member of the Armed Forces who elects to seek relief through this program will receive an undesirable discharge. Thereafter, upon satisfactory completion of a period of alternate service prescribed by the military department or Department of Transportation, such individual will be entitled to receive, in lieu of his undesirable discharge, a clemency discharge in recognition of his fulfillment of the requirements of the program. [However], such clemency discharge shall not bestow entitlement to benefits administered by the Veterans Administration.

The presidential proclamation also covered the conditions under which draft evaders could be granted amnesty by performing two years of “alternate service [that] shall promote the national health, safety, or interest.” However, evaders who had fled the country were deemed to be ineligible.

On Jan. 21, 1977, in his first full day in office, President Jimmy Carter, granted a pardon to most draft evaders without requiring them to perform public service. The Carter pardon, however, did not extend to military deserters. Veterans groups promptly criticized Carter’s action.

In all, about 100,000 Americans went abroad in the late 1960s and early '70s to avoid being called up. Some studies show that as many as 9 in 10 evaders had crossed the northern border into Canada, where after some initial hesitancy they could remain as legal immigrants.

Before Carter issued his pardon, those who had fled to Canada faced jail terms if they returned to the United States. An estimated 50,000 draft dodgers chose to settle permanently in Canada.

(edited from Wikipedia.org and Politico.com)

President Gerald Ford signing the document proclaiming conditional amnesty, Sept. 16, 1974.


AMERICAN BLUES THEATER

Winner of American Theatre Wing’s prestigious National Theatre Company Award, American Blues Theater is a premier arts organization with an intimate environment that patrons, artists, and all Chicagoans call home. American Blues Theater explores the American identity through the plays it produces and communities it serves. Our diverse and multi-generational 36-member Ensemble has nearly 600 combined years of collaboration on stage. As of 2018, our theater and artists have 204 Joseph Jefferson Awards and nominations that celebrate excellence in Chicago theater and 36 Black Theater Alliance Awards. Our artists are honored with Pulitzer Prize nominations, Academy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, Emmy Awards, and numerous other accolades. For over thirty years, American Blues has created essential productions and live theatrical experiences for Chicagoland. Their best known production is Chicago’s holiday tradition It’s a Wonderful Life: Live in Chicago! that has entertained over 50,000 patrons since 2002! Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal wrote American Blues is “exceptional” and the company “feels like home.” Chris Jones of Chicago Tribune claimed Blues is “strikingly honest [with] deep emotional souls.” In addition to first-class theater, American Blues Theater believes it is an honor and duty to serve the community. They provide an integrated arts education program to Chicago Public Schools that serves approximately 3,000 students annually. They hold “Pediatric Previews” which donates a portion of box office sales to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. They donate thousands of complimentary tickets to underserved communities. They provide community engagement events for patrons following Sunday matinee performance, including curated discussions with Northwestern University psychologists. As a Blue Star Theater, they honor military service and first-responders through various initiatives. Former President of Illinois Labor History Society, Larry Spivak wrote, “American Blues is a dynamic force in Chicago – connecting culture, art, history, and politics into a holistic, aesthetic experience.”

SEASON 34 “Then & Now”

by Rick Cleveland* Directed by Marty Higginbotham* Sept 6 - Oct 19, 2019

TRIFLES by Susan Glaspell TRIFLIN’ by Nambi E. Kelley* Directed by Lili-Anne Brown Jan 31 - Mar 14, 2020

by Billie Joe Armstrong, Michael Mayer, & Green Day

Directed by Jess McLeod

Music direction by Michael Mahler*

June 26 - Aug 15, 2020

*Ensemble member of American Blues Theater

ABOUT AMERICAN BLUES THEATER

from Frank Capra’s film Directed by Gwendolyn Whiteside* Music direction by Michael Mahler* Nov 14, ‘19 - Jan 4, ‘20


IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE THEATER

PERFORMANCE VENUE

Stage 773 1225 W Belmont Ave Chicago, IL 60657

BOX OFFICE

(773) 654-3103

FOR MORE INFORMATION

AmericanBluesTheater.com

American Blues Theater is supported in part by The Davee Foundation, The MacArthur Funds for Arts & Culture at Prince, the Shubert Foundation, The Chicago Community Trust, SMART Growth Grant, llinois Arts Council Agency, Anixter Foundation, Actors’ Equity Foundation, Northern Trust, Eurex, Benjamin Rosenthal Foundation, Seyfarth Shaw LLP, and the Chip Pringle Fund. ComEd is the 2018-2019 Season Lighting Sponsor.

ABOUT AMERICAN BLUES THEATER

Documents

BACKSTAGE · THE SPITFIRE GRILL BACKSTAGE GUIDE 5 The Spitfire Grill began as a 1996 film written and directed by Lee David Zlotoff — a filmmaker best known as the creator of the