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Gotta like Fred Pitts, a tall, handsome actor who has been excellent in many roles on several Bay Area stages, who is also a medical doctor.
He is also a self-confessed “history geek.”
“I’ve been reading history books probably since I was 8 years old,” Pitts said during a recent Zoom interview. “My parents had two sets of encyclopedias, and I read those.” As an adult, he had 740 history books on his home bookshelves.
Pitts was a Black student raised in the Baptist church in Ohio, but his parents put him into a Catholic school.
Despite being far from El Camino Real, California’s missions were mentioned in that Ohio Catholic school. The story told, in those days, was how the Spanish conquerors and priests “saved” California’s indigenous people by teaching them Spanish and leading them to Christianity.
History-buff Pitts, on a wine-tasting trip to Sonoma, stumbled across San Francisco Solano Mission a few years ago and was intrigued. He toured it, read up about it, talked with people about it all, and before long set out on his own mission, to visit all 21 California missions.
Pitts is performing his one-man show, “Aren’t You …?”, at Palo Alto Players through the end of August based on that experience.
The title comes from the peculiar experiences he had as a single Black man, by himself, touring the missions surrounded mostly by white people, who couldn’t stop staring and wondering if he was some Black celebrity or another.
“People were coming up to me, saying, ‘You look like Richard Roundtree … Barry Bonds … Sidney Poitier.’ These people weren’t being mean, it was just that I was the only Black person there.”
Pitts started his tour with several missions here in the Bay Area — all but one were built along El Camino Real. One, Mission San Jose, was built across the bay, in Fremont. The idea was that each mission was supposed to be one day away, by horseback, from the next in line.
Pitts learned a lot about the missions. And about people who weren’t used to interacting with Black people.
It makes for a warm and amusing show, as Pitts performs as himself and as 35 other people, ranging from a female bar customer who thought he’d chatted her up, when he hadn’t, to a Black man who also thought he was someone he wasn’t.
There are some great laughs.
The show is no boring educational video, but very entertaining, a fine hour-plus in the theater.
Each mission gets at least a mention, and most get a bit of healthy history making, such as how many hundreds or thousands of California Native Americans are buried at the missions, including some under a parking lot.
“The missions are all unique in their own ways,” Pitts said. He notes the reconstruction of many of them, and the lapsing into destruction of one of them (San Juan Capistrano, which collapsed during an 1812 earthquake).
It’s a gentle, intelligent look at history in this age of condemning Roman Catholic priest Junipero Serra for his abuse of Native Americans, even as the Catholic Church canonized him. Serra established the first nine of California’s 21 Spanish missions.
Pitts is dedicated to learning all sides of history.
“History, for me, depends on who is teaching it, and what they want you to remember. One of my teachers in school glossed over the history of slavery — that was the history that was taught then,” he said. “But you have to tell all of history. I describe it, what happened in the missions, not the rosy view of it. I mention the Chumash revolt (1824), one we never heard about in school. Or, the Nat Turner revolt (1831), which has only been talked about over the last 30 or 40 years. … You have to look at everything.”
“Aren’t You … ?” runs through Aug. 29 in person at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto; and streaming Aug. 27-Sept. 5. In-person tickets $40; online tickets $20. Call 650-329-0891 or visit paplayers.org.
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