There has been a glowing buzz among arts patrons who saw last month’s production of the play “Loving and Loving” at Actors Theatre of Louisville. For months, Arts Angle Vantage suspected young reporters from our program would find inspiration in this story of the couple behind the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Loving vs. Virginia. So we reached out to local teens Trinity Mahaffey and Brayden West to come see the play and asked them to think about writing about it. Right after the curtain call, both said yes. Here is what they had to say.
Thank you to Trinity and Brayden and to Actors Theatre of Louisville for hosting us. The theater had no influence on these articles, as Arts Angle Vantage practices journalistic ethics and standards.
As always, we deeply appreciate LEO Weekly and Editor Erica Rucker for helping us elevate youth voices and the arts by practicing the values of collaborative journalism.
— Elizabeth Kramer, Executive Director, Arts Angle Vantage
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This love letter about an interracial couple was an inspiration for me
By Trinity Mahaffey | Arts Angle Vantage Reporter
Jeffersontown High School, Class of 2025
“I’m gonna miss this place, my first home. My only home. Our first home,” says Mildred Loving to her new husband, Richard. “I’m not gonna cry. I am not gonna cry. Not today.”
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Mildred and Richard are leaving Virginia in 1959, the year after they were married, being told by a judge that they can’t come back for 25 years. It’s a scene in the play “Loving and Loving.” You can feel how heartbroken she is to leave everything she’s known. But she tries to stay strong. This is the only way she and Richard can be together.
I saw “Loving and Loving” in early February at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It ran from Feb. 7 through 18. The play charts the couple behind the U.S. Supreme Court case Loving vs Virginia.
But, if you were to ask me before then, “Who are the Lovings?” I would have told you, “I don’t know.”
The play taught me about the Lovings, and how their courageous love for each other helped legalized interracial marriage in the US. This was eye-opening to me as a biracial kid. It has made me appreciate what others have gone through for me and many others like me. Their journeys, and others like them, make me proud to be multiracial.
I’ve always known my mother is white and my father is Black, and I was different compared to some other kids and families. Around the age of five to seven years old, I first remember fully understanding this difference.
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It was summer, I was running around on the playground, and I heard a girl yell from her window telling me how I was adopted. I was upset and ran to my mom asking her if it was true. To be fair, I don’t look similar to my mom at all, but the girl knew I wasn’t adopted. She kept telling me this for weeks and I would go crying to my mom asking, “Am I adopted?!” a million times. That’s just one of the times where I felt I didn’t fit in on my white or Black side.
Many biracial people go through the what-am-I identity crisis. In a scene in “Loving and Loving,” the couple’s son (Morgan Anita Wood) is curled up next to his mom, Mildred Loving (Nemuna Ceesay), and asks, “If I’m not yellow, then what am I?” I shivered during this scene recalling how I felt being called adopted, and other experiences.
Mildred and Richard Loving (Shane Kenyon) mention how people look at them and their kids and say sly comments. Not only did the Lovings go through this during the ‘60’s, but so did my mom and her Black boyfriend in the ‘90’s in Alabama. My mom received threats for having two biracial kids in the south and moved up to Kentucky for a safer place to live. This was similar to Mildred and Richard wanting to move out of D.C. and back home close to family.
Family and home were the topics many people touched upon during interviews that were part of the play. In videotaped interviews, multiracial people in the Louisville area shared their ideas of home. Althea Allen Dryden said, “Home has always been the place that I created on my own.” Dryden isn’t from Kentucky, same as my mom, but they both found ways to create a home for themselves. She has worked ten years in the nonprofit industry and is the program director of the Louisville Story Program. Another interviewee, Bryan Warren, executive director for Educational Justice, is not from Louisville, but has grown a community here for the past 23 years and says “Louisville’s home now.”
These histories and the Loving’s history taught me how different and similar we can be. I got to see how being an interracial couple and having a mixed family was during the ’50s and ’60s. It also shows people outside of the biracial community this important history.
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Trinity Mahaffey, a Jeffersontown High School junior, sings in her school’s choir, Bella Voce. Trinity is in her school’s Academies of Louisville program studying under its health pathway and is a President of Health Occupations Students of America. She has experience in dance and theater and sometimes holds a one-person show in her room. Trinity wants to keep being involved with the performing arts and sharing the magic of theater.
When theater shows hard-won change, often hard to see in the present, as a source of celebration
By Brayden West | Arts Angle Vantage Reporter
Central High School, Class of 2024
The play “Loving and Loving” has just ended. Lights begin to strobe. Dance music starts to play. And the audience is invited to the floor to celebrate with the cast and the creative directors. People pour onto the dance floor of the black box Victor Jory Theater at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It becomes a celebration.
Today, the approval rating for interracial marriage in the U.S. is at a high of 94%. This wasn’t always the case.
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On July 11, 1958, just five weeks after their wedding, Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from rural Virginia, were arrested in their home for being illegally married. This and the rest of the Lovings’ emotional and thought-provoking story was portrayed in the play, directed by Acosta Powell, written by Beto O’Bryne, and developed by Meropi Peponides.
The play “Loving and Loving,” which ran from Feb. 7 through 18, gives people like the Lovings their recognition for their part in working towards milestones concerning interracial relationships. It’s important we appreciate these trailblazers who risked the status quo, their family and many other things so we could be where we are today. They were part of the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which made laws banning interracial marriage illegal under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
When I was invited to see this play, I was not familiar with the Lovings’ story. My mother, surprised, said, “All interracial couples know about the Lovings.”
The production’s innovative format used video interviews that introduced me to the story and incorporated other interracial points of view. These interviews were of local residents who were children of interracial couples of all ages and from many different backgrounds including African, Asian and Hispanic.
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The performance also put the Lovings’ lives and marriage regarding other events in the lead-up to their case before the Supreme Court, including President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and NASA’s first trip to the moon in 1969.
Just 11 years earlier, in 1958, when the Lovings married, only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Comparing that to today’s statistics and knowing stories like the Lovings and others told with this production serve as a beacon of hope and celebration for me, and other interracial children and couples.
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Brayden West, a senior at Central High School, plays on his school’s tennis and wrestling teams. He participated in the spring 2023 Community Arts Reporting Lab at South Louisville Community Center. The workshop was part of the citywide HeARTS Initiative supported by the Fund for the Arts and Metro Louisville Parks and Recreation. In September 2023., West’s writing appeared in LEO Weekly’s inaugural Under 21 issue.
