History will come alive on the Ashland University campus with Dr. Deleasa Randall-Griffiths’ performance of Carrie Chapman Catt on March 2 at 7 p.m. in the Student Center Auditorium.
In conjunction with this year’s biennial Symposium Against Indifference, this performance is one of the several events AU has held to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment that allowed women the right to vote.

Dr. Randall-Griffiths, associate professor of communication studies, said that she has been involved with the Ashland Chautauqua for around 20 years and decided to begin performing around five years ago starting with Carrie Chapman Catt, who was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Out of all historical figures, Griffiths said that she decided to begin with Catt due to a picture of the second annual League of Women’s Voters that was given to her “by a distant relative” that made her decide to start to research the women who were on the mainstage in the picture, with one of those women being Catt herself.

“When it came time to pick a first character to do for Chautauqua, I thought this is who I want to do, so I started digging into her life, her background and she worked very close with Susan B. Anthony and she would even eventually take over Anthony’s leadership role for her, so this woman definitely had a fascinating history,” Griffiths said. “And what’s cool about doing her, especially this year with the 100 anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. She was one of the few that knew the old guard but lived long enough to see this actually happen because Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all those people died before the Nineteenth Amendment passed, but Catt was young enough to where her life bridges both worlds so I love to tell her story and let her tell their story.”

To portray Catt, Griffiths said she has been preparing for this role since 2013 through extensive research on Catt’s life and her involvement with Ashland Chautauqua, as well as using her passion for acting and her undergraduate degree in theatre to help her perform these historical roles like Catt, calling it a “double sided coin of acting and scholarship.”

“I have been fortunate that through Ashland Chautauqua I feel like I’ve apprenticed with the best of the best and have watched people craft their scripts and do their performances so I learned a lot by observing,” Griffiths said. “And on the scholarship side of things it was just a lot of digging and reading, and now the Library of Congress has Carrie Chapman Catt’s papers digitalized, but when I started this, they didn’t have that, but one of our librarians at the time helped me through her connections at Oberlin College’s library and they had their papers in digital archives…letters, newspaper articles, speeches, all kinds of things…its all kind of organized but it is also a lot so I just had to read and read and read and I am constantly trying to learn more about her through the new stuff that is coming out about her.”

Griffiths’ performance of Catt is given in a “living history” Chautauqua format, which was originally developed by the Chautauqua circuit that traveled in the 18th to 19th centuries and has since come to include “people who are scholars and research the history of a character and then portray them.”

The current Chautauqua format in her performance, according to Griffiths, begins with a pre-show slide presentation on the suffrage movement and is followed by a three part presentation by Griffiths herself, with the first part being a half hour in character monologue, the second an in character question and answer session, and concludes with an out of character question and answer session so that broader topics may be covered.

She also said that she wants people to know that with each question and answer session, the audience can ask different questions, but remember that she, not Catt, can answer questions like ‘how did you die’ because Catt would not know it in the time period that the presentation is being given in.

With the theme of the Symposium Against Indifference this year being “liberty and responsibility,” Griffiths said that Catt’s story fits well into this theme because her story of the moment in history where women got the right to vote is “a smaller part of the broad range of topics and speakers” at this year’s symposium and tells of the 70 or more years that women in America went through to get the vote and the future beyond achieving that right and responsibility.

Although this event is open to everyone, Griffiths said people should come and experience this event for themselves because “it’s a fun way to learn about history” and though you can read a book about the historical figures that are presented in these Chautauqua performances, Griffiths said that people really enjoy that half hour of “just getting to pretend that this historical person is really there talking to you” and believes people may even learn something from history that they did not potentially know before.
Overall, Griffiths said that the best-case scenario for these performances is that “people leave wanting to know more” and also realize that the present is not too different from the past, especially in the case of Catt and women’s rights.

“Hopefully people not only learn about the past, but also kind of reflect or integrate in to things that are going on right now, we can always see the universal in the historical stories and so I hope that people leave saying, ‘gosh, this is so much like blank what we are dealing with today’ and even if its not how Catt would have handled it, maybe we just get fueled by the fight that went on and the people who didn’t give up, maybe it helps us not give up,” Griffiths said. “This work feels like I am passing a baton on to younger people who I hope would then carry this history on like a relay race to other people.”