Kansas City Playwright Takes A Journey Based On ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’

As families prepare to pile into cars for summer vacations, one new play takes a trip back in time to explore the experience of black travelers in Jim Crow-era America.

Kansas City playwright Michelle Tyrene Johnson’s new work,The Green Book Wine Club Train Trip, gets a staged reading at the Olathe Civic Theatre Association’s this weekend, after winning the OCTA’s New Works Playwright Competition, when audiences voted for the winning script over the course of two nights in March. That same month, it was staged in the New York City at the National Black Theatre.

The play’s main character is a soft-spoken librarian named Marie. She’s researching a memory book for her grandmother’s 80th birthday, and has invited her friends to tag along with her on a weekend train trip to St. Louis.

As part of her research, Marie has been studying “The Negro Motorist Green Book.” It’s a guidebook that was published from 1936 to 1966, when widespread discrimination limited the safe places blacks could stay while traveling. When the train Marie and her friends are riding on stops in Boonville, Missouri, she steps out to get some fresh air and is accidentally transported back to the 1940s.
Johnson first encountered a copy of the “Green Book” in a glass case at a museum of African-American history in Greensboro, North Carolina. She says she was immediately intrigued. Once she’d settled on writing a play about time travel, she knew she had to find a way to use it.

Vintage copies of the guidebook are extremely rare, so Johnson did not have a chance to read it before writing the play. She found what she thought were replicas of the guidebook’s cover on Amazon, and ordered a few to use as stage props. What

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