The Wheels are Turning For Us: My Spring in Harlem, a Ragtime Experience

This spring I got the opportunity to work on the wonderful musical Ragtime, by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, and it was (in a word) an experience. While juggling rehearsals, 18 credit hours, and a part time job I certainly had my work cut out for me, but I was enriched in many significant ways by the experience. Ragtime was an amazing opportunity for me to join with a cast of 40 brilliant actors, a phenomenal crew, and a truly inspiring creative team to explore not only a timely and powerful text, but to research and look into the societal conditions which inspired the text. With the presentation of Ragtime we got to explore the history of our nation and its relationship with the immigrant and African American communities who built it into the country it is today, and to ask what it truly meant to be an American, and how some people are often left shut out of that vision for our country. Through this beautiful work we got to really ask these questions of ourselves, our society, and of our audience, and I think we used them to get a bit closer to not only truth, but genuine understanding.