New York actress, award-winning playwright and jazz pianist Marjorie Eliot feels a strong kinship to historical personages and children–and has created a series of school assemblies and history theatre workshops, mainly for children ages seven to twelve, but also for high school students and adults. When performing for children, Ms. Eliot is most happy to have children seated in a semi-circle around her in order to achieve the intimacy of story and music.

In The Jazz Journey, an assembly, Ms. Eliot concentrates mainly on Duke Ellington. She gives a series of short monologues that explain the melodies and titles of several up tempo songs, such as "Take the A Train" and "Come Sunday." As she weaves the story, Ms. Eliot is accompanied by a jazz trumpet player and the children for whom she has brought tambourines.

In A Brighter Day, an assembly, Ms. Eliot tells the children about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 19th century America’s foremost black woman author and poet. Her novel Iola Leroy was the first published novel by an African American woman. Dedicated to love, God, home, justice, abolition and freedom, her poems struck deep chords and had a wide readership. A widow and brave woman, she supported herself and her daughter through her earnings as a writer, poet and speaker. Mrs. Harper traveled alone and spoke throughout the north and south.

In Harlem Renaissance Week, children rehearse and perform scenes of child life in Harlem during its Renaissance in the early part of the 20th century. Written especially for the participating children by Marjorie Eliot, the scenes deal with issues of family, poverty, and artistry in a vibrant and sensitive manner.

In Colonial History Week, children perform a play Ms. Eliot has written to dramatize complex relationships among colonial aristocrats, indentured servants, and slaves in a wealthy, late eighteenth-century household.

Ms. Eliot is also happy to work with individual schools or libraries to develop a History-Theatre Workshop based on a subject chosen by the school or library. Choices could include, but are not limited to: Duke Ellington, Little Rock and Desegregation, Thomas Jefferson, and Abigail Adams on Educating Girls.

This is how it works. After meeting with students on Monday, Ms. Eliot finishes the play that night, tailoring the play to the participating children. She and the students rehearse Tuesday thru Thursday, and a performance is given on Friday. Ms. Eliot’s History Theatre Workshops have been performed since 1988 at the Morris-Jumel Mansion (Manhattan’s oldest residence and an historic house museum) and in several New York City public schools.

Marjorie Eliot’s closely observed, true-to-life dramatic writing of scenes featuring children make her work ideal for encouraging children’s creative expression. The scenes also have great pedagogical value because they use the power of drama to present complex historical social relationships with an immediacy and reality which would be impossible with a more conventional teaching approach.

Ms. Eliot was honored in November 2004 by the Jazz Museum of Harlem. In 2003 she received an AUDELCO Outstanding Pioneer Award for Achievement as a Playwright. Founded in 1973, AUDELCO’s are awarded annually to recognize and honor excellence in Black Theatre.

"For hosting Sunday concerts in her parlor to preserve the heritage of Harlem Jazz," Marjorie Eliot was a Year 2000 Honoree of City Lore’s People’s Hall of Fame, an annual awards celebration and party established in 1993 that honors grassroots contributions to New York’s cultural life. Taking as its symbol a historic New York subway token, City Lore presents "tokens of their esteem" to individuals and organizations who are contributing creatively to the folk culture of New York City. The awards are selected by a committee of New York City-lovers working closely with City Lore’s Board of Directors. A Google search will reveal many fine newspaper stories on Ms. Eliot’s free, Sunday afternoon Parlor Entertainment concerts. European broadcasters routinely show up to interview Marjorie at her studio/home/parlor at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, a building with a very rich musical legacy. Every August she coordinates a jazz concert in front of the Morris Jumel Mansion.

A graduate of Talladega College, Ms. Eliot was for many years Writer-in-Residence at the Hudson Valley Freedom Theatre, creating its theatre programs for children and adults. Hudson Valley’s Artistic Director, Curt Stewart, produced 20 of her plays during her tenure, including The Circle Is Complete and Billy’s Last Request. Her acting credits include the original New York and original tour productions of Charles Gordone’s Pulitzer Prize wining No Place To Be Somebody. She appeared in Phillip Hayes Dean’s The Owl Killer, Every Night When the Sun Goes Down, Sty of the Blind Pig, and Black Noel. She was in the Phoenix Theatre’s Broadway production of The Member of the Wedding. She appeared in the film Serpico and on television was in J.E. Franklin’s Black Girl, Nightside with John Cassavetes, and Blue Monday.

Background on "A Brighter Coming Day"

a dramatic theatrical portrayal of the life of

based upon her poems, speeches, novels and letters

-from Iola Leroy, 1892

Chaste in language, moral in character, and fiery in spirit, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, abolitionist, feminist, Christian writer, and temperance and woman’s rights organizer, was truly a 19^th century Renaissance woman of letters. Born on September 24, 1825 to a free black woman and an unknown father, Frances poignantly wrote thirty-four years later, "Oh, is it not a privilege, if you are sisterless and lonely, to be a sister to the human race, and to place your heart where it may throb close to down-trodden humanity."

Filled with courage, compassion, danger, difficulty and intelligence, her life and work shine light on that period of American history after the Civil War which so cruelly combined progress and goodness, racist black sliding and fear.

In an era where it was deemed unseemly, if not shocking, for an unmarried, young woman, black or white, to address mixed audiences of men and women, the Maine Anti-Slavery Society helped launch a lifelong career, when in 1854, they hired Frances Ellen Watkins, at age 29, to speak on their behalf. A radical antebellum abolitionist, Miss Watkins preached and practiced the politics of Free Produce, urging economic boycotts of slave produced goods. Denied appointment as an agent because of obdurate sexism, Frances Watkins, nevertheless, collected donations for the Underground Railroad and counted among her friends Frederick Douglass, William Still, John Brown, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. After the abolition of slavery, she was especially concerned with helping women understand why they could and should use their time and talents to achieve "high and lofty" goals."

She married in November 1860 a widower Fenton Harper by whom she had a child, Mary. Four years later, upon the death of her husband and unprotected by civil law, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper needed to make a living to support her daughter and herself. She resumed her writing and grueling speaking tours in the south dedicated to suffrage, women’s education, and particularly the welfare and elevation of newly freed black women. In the 1890's she gained a national reputation for her brilliant speeches and organizing for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Association of Colored Women.

Long recognized as the most popular black poet prior to Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mrs. Harper also wrote Iola Leroy (1892), probably the best known and most reprinted African American novel published before Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Similar to Charles Dickens and Balzac, Mrs. Harper’s three other novels, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77) and Trial and Triumph (1888-89), were published in serial form, in Mrs. Harper’s case by The Christian Recorder, the bi-monthly magazine of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church.

Entertaining, provocative, and a joy to read, Mrs. Harper grabs readers from the first moment. The main characters are "true men and true women" who "make every gift, whether gold or talent, fortune or genius, subserve the cause of crushed humanity and carry out the greatest ideas of the present age, the glorious idea of human brotherhood."

Actress, award-winning playwright and jazz pianist Marjorie Eliot feels a powerful kinship with and emotional closeness to Frances W. E. Harper. Both women–loving, Christian, working mothers. Both–lithe, graceful and soft spoken. Both–gutsy, disciplined and dedicated to social justice and the wholeness of families. Both–persuaded that personal survival and well-being are inextricably linked to the well-being and survival of the larger society. Both–craftswomen of the spoken and written word.

On August 23, 1996, New York Times columnist David Gonzalez wrote a feature story about Marjorie Eliot entitled, "Living Room For Jazz, Uptown Again." Every Sunday afternoon in New York City, Marjorie opens her living room to the public free of charge to come uptown and hear the best jazz musicians in New York play free of commercial pressure. Of the concerts, Ms. Eliot says, "It’s experiencing the artist at work, like the difference between going to a film and going to the theatre. This is our culture; it’s not a joke. I see it as the essence of who African-Americans are...When people get together, this is something nobody can take away or ever intrude on. Whatever creative expression we have and experience, nobody can do anything about it. Jesse Helms eat your heart out!"

This same blazing, beautiful spirit radiates when Marjorie Eliot takes center stage as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

The technical requirements for A Brighter Coming Day include the use of a tuned upright piano, unless Ms. Eliot chooses to come with a live cellist, and a simple stool.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poems, letters, speeches and novels move the spirit, inspire the heart and provoke thought. Noted below are her writings and a few other books of interest:

Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876-77), Trial and Triumph (1888-89), Three Re-Discovered Novels, edited by Frances S. Foster, Boston, Beacon Press, 1995.

Iola Leroy, first published 1892, New York, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers and Oxford University Press, 1988.

A Brighter Coming Day, A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, edited by Frances Smith Foster, New York, Feminist Press, 1990.

Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers and Oxford University Press, 1988.

Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, by Melba Joyce Boyd, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1994.

Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women 1746-1892, Indiana University Press, 1993.

The Underground Railroad, by William Still, Philadelphia, originally published by Porters and Coates, 1871; re-issued Chicago, Ebony Classics Series, Johnson Publishing, 1970.

The above information was prepared and written by Tanya Bickley for Tanya Bickley Enterprises, Inc. for the helpful use of the public.