ABOVE: The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King with Rabbi Jacob Rothschild and his wife Janice Rothschild (now Blumberg), photographed at Atlanta’s first integrated banquet, January, 1965. Organized by the rabbi, that event, held in the magnificent chandeliered ballroom of the Dinkler Plaza Hotel (in the FairliePoplar district of Downtown Atlanta, razed in 1972) was attended by 1,400 guests.
Maize dug deep into the story. How did the rabbi and his wife cope that morning and afterward? How did local news cover the story? How did the community respond? What was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s response? What words came from Ralph McGill, the legendary editor of The Atlanta Constitution, an eventual Pulitzer Prize winner? Maize, 36, had not known of the bombing but became “riveted,” seeing tremendous potential for theater. “I love to take an incident that didn’t make the history books,” he says, “especially a story that was turning into a footnote, but you realize it speaks to now. You do smack
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your head, wondering why it wasn’t already a work of art.” Atlanta author Melissa Fay Greene did some of the exhaustive legwork for the play in her 1996 book The Temple Bombing. Full of interviews (and therefore potential characters and lines of dialogue), Greene’s book is cited as the main inspiration for the new drama. Maize also did his own interviews and studied court transcripts, news stories, Rothschild sermons and more. He weighed everything from MLK to the murders of Emmett Till (in 1955) and Leo Frank (in 1915), he says, all the way forward to the Black Lives Matter movement today. One invaluable resource: Janice Rothschild Blumberg, married to the rabbi (he died in 1973) at the time of the bombing. An author and historian herself, Blumberg has written extensively about The Temple and the history of Jews in Atlanta. Where does the Moment Work come in? Ordinarily, a play starts with the script. Actors audition and are cast, rehearsals commence and costumes, lights and scenery are designed and built. With Moment Work, the actors and designers convene before any words are scripted. Through workshops and exercises, they all study the subject matter, brainstorm, conceptualize and suggest “moments,” also considered “units of theatrical time.”
BILL ROTHSCHILD
Alliance partnership with New York’s award-winning Tectonic Theater Project (The Laramie Project). Tectonic company member Jimmy Maize, a selfdescribed jack-of-all-trades, was enlisted to shape the piece through Moment Work, a process pioneered by Tectonic. He is both the playwright and the play’s director.