The Bergen Community College student cast of “More Than One Story.”
PARAMUS, N.J. – Bergen Community College will conclude a two-year project that compiled the accounts of Bergen County residents and their immigration experiences during a verbatim theatre performance this month. Verbatim theatre features the actual words, narratives and testimonies from first-person submissions by combining them into a single creative work. Student actors will offer testimonies from more than 200 oral histories during the Bergen Institute for the Creative Arts’ “More Than One Story” performance on Thursday, September 19 at 7:30 p.m. in the Anna Maria Ciccone Theatre (400 Paramus Road, Paramus). Tickets are complimentary, but reservations are highly encouraged. RSVP at tickets.bergen.edu.
For the “More Than One Story” project, Bergen Professors Christine Eubank, Ph.D., and Leigh Jonaitis, Ph.D., received oral histories from first- and second-generation Bergen County immigrants through an open submission call last year. The professors compiled the submissions, organized experiences by themes and then created a longform narrative. The process took 14 months. The faculty developed the project as part of Bergen’s 2023-24 “common read,” which encouraged students, faculty and staff to read the same book: A Map is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family and the Meaning of Home, edited by Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary.
“These stories are part of an ongoing initiative to capture and preserve for future generations the rich history of the folks who make Bergen County their home,” Eubank said. “It’s been an honor and privilege to hear the first-person testimonials from so many of our students and community members who’ve generously shared their memories and experiences. In weaving those stories together, creating ‘More Than One Story,’ we’re able to share those voices with the community and, perhaps, foster a deeper and more humanistic understanding of the past and the present.”
The professor pair has worked together on other verbatim theatre projects at the College as well, including The Ancestor Journeys: Coming to Jones Road (2023), which appeared as part of the Coming to Jones Road Project that spotlighted the work of Englewood artist Faith Ringgold. The overall project won the 2023 Stanley Katz Prize for Excellence in Public Humanities.
“I find these stories to be compelling – not only for those who identify as an ‘immigrant,’ but for anyone who has ever seen themselves as an outsider,” Jonaitis said. “Much of what we viewed when watching these online oral histories seemed vaguely familiar to me. I realized that I have heard and read similar stories when working with students in my 25 years of teaching at Bergen, whether in discussion or in students’ personal writing. As Christine and I developed the script, it struck me that those who have not worked with our population might not have had the opportunity to hear such stories. This then underscored for me the very need for such a project: to enable the general public to see our first- and second-generation students as we have been able to see them. These stories are important. They deserve to be heard.”
Based in Paramus, Bergen Community College (www.bergen.edu), a public two-year coeducational college, enrolls more than 13,000 students at locations in Paramus, the Philip Ciarco Jr. Learning Center in Hackensack and Bergen Community College at the Meadowlands in Lyndhurst. The College offers associate degree, certificate and continuing education programs in a variety of fields. More students graduate from Bergen than any other community college in the state.
# # #