Last week, President Trump allowed the release of records on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination secreted at the National Archives. Perhaps it will end the conspiracy by progressives to cloud that a communist killed Camelot. It is unlikely, however, to reverse the harm done by the movie “JFK,” which caused the late Michael Kelly to bemoan the “culture” that “produced Oliver Stone as a historian.”
Too bad Phelim McAleer was not around to make a documentary, produce a film, or write a play; maybe everyone would know who killed JFK.
McAleer authored “Ferguson,” a play which opened last week to sold-out crowds in New York City; it runs into November. Based on the transcript of the grand jury that refused to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown, the play, directed by Jerry Dixon, does the impossible. Nearly 25 days of testimony become a riveting, emotional, and compelling 90-minute performance, with blocking, pacing, and movement that belies its origin from a witness chair in a Missouri courtroom. The audience is the grand jury and hears firsthand the district attorneys’ instructions and questions and the witnesses’ testimony.
From a sober opening by the prosecutor, through early scene-setting, (humdrum even humorous), the testimony builds and interplays, leading inexorably to the finale we know is coming but with a verbatim specificity we have never heard. Suddenly, as an off-stage drum beats, Officer Wilson (played by Ian Campbell Dunn), firearm drawn and aimed into the face of onrushing death, chokes out his horrified testimony as the black female district attorney (Kim Brockington) relentlessly prods a reluctant young black woman (Renika Williams) who saw it and knows the truth:
A. I’m not, you know, really big on talking to the police or defending police or anything like that. I’m just being real honest with you. [But] I feel like the officer was in the right and that is a lot of saying…
Q. Do you feel like this could have ended up any other way?
A. Yeah, it could have, if Michael Brown had just stopped running, yeah, it could have ended a different way. That’s the other way. The officer had no other choice…
All three and many in the audience are tearful in these climactic moments.
It is over and we know what the grand jury knew, what state and local prosecutors knew, and what Attorney General Eric Holder and his legal team in Washington—eager to make headlines with a civil rights suit against Officer Wilson and the police department—knew. Michael Brown never raised his hands in surrender and cried, “Hands up; Don’t shoot.” We know the political movement spawned August 9, 2014, Black Lives Matter, was built on that terrible lie — a lie the mainstream media perpetrated, that cowardly politicians, fearful of saying “all lives matter,” emboldened, a lie that spread like cancer through inner cities endangering men and women in blue and the citizens who look to them for protection.
McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney are no strangers to controversial projects. Their 2013 documentary, “FrackNation,” debunked the lies by radical environmental groups and Vladimir Putin about the 60-year old technology (hydraulic fracturing) that is making the U.S. energy independent. Their best-selling book, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, shouted to the world what the mainstream media ignored. And their dramatic movie about his trial and conviction for murder is soon to be in nationwide release at a theater near you. Nonetheless, “Ferguson” may be their boldest effort yet. Sent reeling by the reception from the stage that greeted Vice President Mike Pence when he saw “Hamilton,” they want to put a play on Broadway that ordinary Americans can see and not be laughed at, libeled, and lectured on the failings of their great country. “Ferguson” will fit that bill.
Best of all, in 2068, no one will be wondering what really happened in Ferguson.
William Perry Pendley is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, has argued cases before the Supreme Court and worked in the Department of the Interior during the Reagan administration. He is the author of “Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today.”
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