Each year the Kennedy Center honors excellence in college theater with the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. This year a production from Santa Monica College was chosen to participate in the prestigious competition. Jennifer Holland has the story.

[Singing]
A slave's life....

Holland:
>>A home-grown maestro is taking his work to the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Slavery, a play written, arranged and adapted by director-performer Jonathan Payne is one of 14 plays selected for this honor from among 63 colleges and universities in the western United States. This spiritual montage of testimony and songs woven together like the patchwork of a quilt explores the voices of slavery from the bittersweet joys of marriage and everyday life to the horrors and defiance of the auction block.

[Singing]
No more iron block

Holland:
I'm here with the talent behind this masterpiece, Jonathan Payne. Jonathan is this just a history lesson or does it have something else to say about today?

Payne:
>> I think it has a lot to say about today. In a sense, it's the past reaching to the future. And what they're doing is reminding us of where we come from.

[Holland: voice over]
Payne took the play's monologues from a public record of actual interviews of those who experienced slavery firsthand. The characters in his play are the real people whose lives and accounts were documented by the Federal Writer's Project of the Work's Progress Administration in 1929. Payne mixed these real stories with the musical tradition of Negro spirituals, the song and dance expression of customs and religion that grew up among slaves on the plantation. Working, through the mentorship of SMC faculty members Terren Adair-Lynch and Adrianne Harrop, Payne has created a tightly-knit performing ensemble of six college students and himself.

Cast Member Maxine Carter:
>> That is the most important thing because we're always out on stage. There's no break. And no-one leaves the stage, ever. So when you're out there with each other, you have to gel. You have to communicate without communicating, you know what I mean? And we do that.

Holland:
>>The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival celebrates excellence and education in theater and involves 600 academic institutions throughout the country. The next step for Slavery and it's cast is to perform at California State University in Hayward. If the show wins its original competition, it could go on to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC this April.

[Singing]

[Voice over]
This is Jennifer Holland for Santa Monica College update.

>> This isn't the first year that Santa Monica College has participated in this competition. The 1997 production of Once on this Island went all the way to Washington DC. To the casting crew of Slavery from all of us at Santa Monica Update, "Break a leg."