It was one of her few lines in the play, but with her screaming and shouting, Joyce Pearson, as Mammie, changed the initial slow tone of “Keep Your Eye on the Drinkin’ Gourd” Friday evening at St. Luke AME Church.

Napoleon Crews portrays a musician in his original play Keep

“Hold on y’all! Hold on! This ain’t no funeral. This is a celebration!”

But Pearson’s lines and the singing of a jazzed-up spiritual, “Wade in the Water,” are the only celebration early on, as Cora, a young slave girl played by Aisha Holm, learns that she must run to Lawrence from a Missouri plantation to escape being sold to another master.

Pearson and Holm are two of the cast of church and community members in the play written by Lawrence author Napoleon Crews. The dinner play opened Friday in the Langston Hughes Fellowship Hall with more than 70 audience members.

Crews wrote the play as a testament to Lawrence and the free state-slave state conflict. Especially meaningful because it was produced during Black History Month, Crews said all of his actors seemed to identify with their characters.

“I didn’t anticipate the emotion that would come out,” he said.

The cast includes Douglas County Sheriff Ken McGovern, who said it was his first role since his junior high days.

McGovern played Sheriff Sam Jones. Jones – in this fictional scenario – left pro-slavery Missouri and became the Douglas County sheriff thanks to some ballot-stuffing.

From left Ken McGovern as Sheriff

“He was a strong-arm. Instead of upholding the law, he just kind of made the laws up on his own,” McGovern said.

A second performance will begin at 7 p.m. today. A dinner of Cornish game hen, rice stuffing and trimmings will be served before the show.

Funds raised will go toward the restoration of the nearly 100-year-old building, where Langston Hughes, a Harlem Renaissance poet, attended church as a boy.

Holm’s final line of the opening scene could have Kansans smiling.

“I’m running to Kansas. I’m running to freedom,” she said.