Plays / Chronology / Hazard County / More About Hazard County The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2005 Humana Festival HAZARD COUNTY “A shocking number of the details in the play are actually true,” reports playwright Allison Moore about Hazard County. In 1995, a young African-American man murdered a young white man from Guthrie in southwestern Kentucky. They had exchanged words at a gas station, tried to out-drive each other and then Freddie Morrow took out his gun. Egged on by his friends in the car, Morrow shot. Michael Westerman died the next day. While sympathy ran high for the murdered man, another story soon began to emerge: the white man was flying a Confederate flag off the back of his pick-up truck on the weekend before Martin Luther King, Jr.Day, and may have used a racial epithet back at the gas station. So whose civil rights were violated first? A Southern woman, born and raised in Texas and a graduate of Southern Methodist University, Allison Moore has transplanted herself to Minneapolis—practically as far as you can get from Texas before you hit Canada. “I definitely still and probably always will see myself as a Texan,” she says, “It’s such a huge part of who I am…but I think that living away has given me some distance.” Directing her displaced Southerner’s eye on the incident in Guthrie, Moore considers the situation from a different perspective—mingling the main story with views of the South from around the rest of the country, as shared by fans and foes of The Dukes of Hazzard. In Hazard County, Ruth is a single mother, trying to get by in the only place she knows and raise her children well. Blake is a television news producer, in from the West Coast, raised on the East Coast, trying to find the real South. Ruth and her cousin Camille know all of the redneck jokes and, being Southern and facing a questioning Northerner, Ruth tries to explain her situation, even while Camille rises in defense and the locals set Blake’s car on fire. Blake does not understand what it means to so firmly identify with a place or a piece of land, and Ruth can’t imagine being someplace where she’s a stranger. Since the beginning of the American Experiment, there has been a divide between the industrial North and the agrarian South. This rift was formalized by the drawing of the Mason-Dixon Line, and seared into memory with the Civil War. Kentucky was officially neutral in the War Between the States, although at least 150,000 men went to fight for both North and South, oftentimes literally brother against brother. From Reconstruction through the founding of the Ku Klux Klan to the Civil Rights Movement to the rise and fall of affirmative action, the line remains. As we struggle to remain a single country, we alternately fight against and embrace our dissimilarities. We are blue states and red states, liberals and rednecks, soccer moms and NASCAR dads, stars and stripes and stars and bars. Stereotypes of the South abound in pop culture, and we consume them happily. Many are quite heroic. We all wish we would never go hungry again like Scarlett, or that we could outwit and out-drive Smokey like the Bandit did. We want our family to be as loving and loyal—and have as cool a car—as the Dukes. The image of small-town life as seen on TV, where everyone knows and takes care of each other, is abiding and appealing. But there are the times in the real small towns when it feels as if the Civil War—or the War of Northern Aggression—is still being fought. The heroic image of independent, self-sufficient men and women gets mixed up with the pervasive reputation of racism and small-mindedness just as easily as these television shows morph into high camp. And the view from the South to the rest of the country is just as skewed: Northerners are godless socialists—aggressors seeking to suppress a way of life. Another story was embedded in the murder in Guthrie. The young shooter, a boy really, had recently moved to Kentucky from Chicago, where he had been taught nothing about the Civil War or the history of the confederate flag. “I thought it was just the Dukes of Hazzard sign.” Just as confounded, the dead man’s wife, Hannah, said, “The truck’s red. The flag’s red. They match.” The NAACP fought for and then abandoned Morrow; Westerman was declared the last ‘Confederate Martyr’—and the case grew beyond a senseless murder and into something that polarized Guthrie and beyond. Moore orchestrates this collision of regional perceptions with an underlying layer of irony, to investigate the line between media images and the complex truth of real lives. Hazard County is not an indictment of the media or pop culture, or small-town Southern living, but it forces us to take a harder look at a situation than we might. When the local high school’s sports teams are The Rebels, and the route is down the Dixie Highway, we must all decide whether the Confederate Flag is a symbol of ancestral pride or an enduring symbol of the unhealed wounds left on us by history. Recent referendums about whether the flag should be retired from state buildings, or the continuing case here in Kentucky of the girl suing her school for barring her from wearing her Confederate Flag dress to the prom, and, certainly, the murder of Michael Westerman, make us wonder about the legacy of Reconstruction. By zooming in on a young mother and a young professional seeking redemption, Allison Moore does not let us come to easy conclusions about who we are or where we are. — Julie Felise Dubiner ALLISON MOORE “Where I grew up the people are good people, they are trying to make the right decisions and they’re funny and they’re charming and they’re all this, that and the other,” proudly states Hazard County playwright Allison Moore. Hailing from the middle of Texas, Moore believes that her upbringing provides her with a definite sense of identity, which she appreciates more since moving to the wintry northern climate of Minneapolis. In fact, it is this distance that has allowed her to develop a sense of affection for her home as she aims to write Southerners as real people and not as “boogie men.” For Moore believes there is a “portrayal of people from Texas or the South, or people from small towns, where they’re either lumped together as the archetypal buffoon or presented as evil. Which is just not true!” With her writing, Moore aims to challenge these unfair cultural representations and demonstrate the complex realities of people today. Moore’s plays often focus on the conflict between a person’s moral duty to society and their pursuit of individual happiness. These opposing forces usually clash in the intimate and high-stakes family structure and find their resolve when characters finally give in to their innermost desires. In Urgent Fury a man leaves his family, in Eighteen a woman seduces her niece and in CowTown a sister abandons her brother to the ridicule of the high school hierarchy. These difficult decisions leave the audience with several questions of what is “right” in an uncertain modern world. While her plays discuss serious issues of personal responsibility, Moore imbues her writing with pointed comedy and rich emotional landscapes, creating a delicate balance of thought and feeling. Beginning her life in theatre as an actress, Moore chanced onto playwriting after an auditioner for admission to Southern Methodist University’s undergraduate acting program asked her if she was interested in any other areas of theatre. Without having put a word to the page, Moore proudly proclaimed, “Oh, yes, I’m a playwright.” Startled by her declaration, that night she returned home and wrote her very first scene. As she continued the acting track at SMU, she became hooked on playwriting after taking classes during her junior year. What began as an audition fluke soon blossomed into an M.F.A. from Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop, two Jerome Fellowships and a McKnight Advancement Grant. While Moore admits to having written “angsty teenage poetry” and considers writing a novella one day, she appreciates playwriting for the different points of view that other people bring to a new work. Comparing plays to architecture, Moore explains that what’s on the page is like a blueprint, inviting many others to bring different qualities. In the true collaborative spirit, she believes there are many ways to envision a play, stating, “That’s something very exciting to me—that it’s not 100% settled.” In fact, Moore considers one of the most gratifying parts of the process the moment the play becomes the property of the people performing it. Moore’s clever plays and generous spirit have not gone unnoticed in the theatre world. Her plays have been read and developed across the country at The Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Florida Repertory Theatre. Moore is no stranger to the Humana Festival either, having been featured as one of the contributors to the 2002 Anthology Project, Snapshot. Through each of her projects Allison Moore has championed the belief that theatre must contain enough excitement to make us “marvel at the world, at life, at possibility.” By examining difficult social problems while remaining mindful and appreciative of her roots, Allison Moore has truly molded the theatrical medium to fit her unique voice. — Kyle J. Schmidt