Faculty of Arts and Sciences

On Nov. 3, 1979, labor activists rallied in Greensboro, North Carolina, to protest the continued threat of violence posed by the KKK and the American Nazi Party. The activists, who were also members of the Communist Workers Party, had gathered near a housing complex when Klansmen and American Nazis opened fire on the unarmed marchers. Within 88 seconds, they killed four CWP protesters and wounded 12. A fifth protester later died from his injuries.

What might have spurred a prolonged national reckoning was instead overshadowed by the events of the next day, when Iranian student revolutionaries took 66 hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran. In Greensboro, the massacre was a point of continuing contention and reflection; on the national stage, it faded from public memory.

But events such as Greensboro have a way of eventually rising to the surface. Music professor César Alvarez, a composer and lyricist, is shining new light on the massacre, reckoning with the events of Nov. 3 in a musical, The Potluck.

A co-production of SoHo Rep and INTAR Theatre, The Potluck runs June 30 to July 26 in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. Directed by Sarah Benson, it features a 12-person intergenerational cast and opens The Hunger Cycle, three world premieres SoHo Rep is staging over three seasons around the question “What are we hungry for?”

For Alvarez, born in Greensboro a year after the killings, the aftermath was “the soil that I grew out of.”

Alvarez’s parents were also members of the CWP, although they were not in Greensboro the day of the rally. In homage, they named their child César James for two of their murdered friends.

Alvarez is perhaps best known for their 2015 work Futurity, co-written with the New York indie band The Lisps. Set during the American Civil War, Futurity won a Lucille Lortel Award in 2016 for Outstanding Musical.

Among their many more recent honors, Alvarez was a 2018–20 Princeton Arts Fellow and has received the Jonathan Larson Award, the Edward Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre for lyrics, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

What the musical can hold

In 2017, Alvarez received a commission to turn the events surrounding the Greensboro Massacre into a musical, an assignment that on its face sounded almost impossible.

“How am I going to turn something so grisly and so sad into a musical, which is supposed to be fun and joyful?” Alvarez recalls thinking.

At the same time, Alvarez says, the job felt inevitable.

“I always knew I needed to address the story at some point in my life,” Alvarez says. “In the piece, I have to face the fact that, well, I’m a storyteller, and this is my story and I probably need to tell it. And I have to learn the lessons, and I have to share the lessons.”

Alvarez had always been drawn to such innovative musicals as Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, and Michael Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch’s A Chorus Line, musicals that dealt with, respectively, a serial murderer, the Third Reich, and an unvarnished portrayal of the mental and physical struggles of dancers on Broadway.

The musical is capacious enough, Alvarez says, to contain “very dark things, and actually be a space for people to encounter those things in a new way because of the power of the form.”

Alvarez’s artistic voyage back to Greensboro began after the 2017 white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, which killed one counterprotester and spurred a mood of national disgust and horror that such a naked display of white supremacist aggression could still happen.

In Greensboro, no one was surprised, Alvarez says.

The communal sentiment was, “this is actually quite familiar, and this is what happened to us,” Alvarez says. The Klan members who were arrested after the Greensboro Massacre and indicted were later acquitted in two criminal trials in federal and state courts after asserting self-defense. And some newspaper accounts from the time blamed the massacre on the CWP, Alvarez says.

“That’s what inspired me to say, actually, this is maybe an important time to bring up the wisdom that our community has around this question of what happens when the government supports a white supremacist murdering you,” Alvarez says.

As Alvarez developed the musical, they moved away from a strict record of the events of Nov. 3, which had already been documented in books, newspapers, and the 2004 Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and toward a more intimate imagining of the lives of the dead, while also taking on capitalism, racism, and generational trauma.

“I grew up in a context of social justice and activism,”  Alvarez says. "I suspect that when I started writing it, I probably thought that it was going to be a lot more historical, and a lot more political, and it has become so spiritual, and so personal, and so much a contemplation of how to be inside a cataclysm. Which I didn’t really set out to do, and I didn’t really know that was what it was going to be, but I also think that’s part of why it’s so resonant right now.”

In SoHo Rep’s telling, the show that began as a commission about the Greensboro Massacre became one about ghosts, capitalism, and recovering from trauma inflicted before you were born.

Honoring the five

Photos of the five dead hang in Alvarez’s work studio as a reminder of their humanity and a spur to creation. Alvarez grew up inside of the survivor community, and those friendships that have lasted to this day.

Alvarez spent seven years shaping The Potluck, which was presented in concert at Dartmouth and Lincoln Center in April 2025 before its full staging this summer.

For Piper Hill, Guarini ’22, who studied with Alvarez in the Digital Musics (now Sonic Practice) program and worked on The Potluck as an assistant music director, Alvarez’s ability to bring the “spirits of the five to life and honor them in this way is really unique. I find it to be a powerful piece, because they’re speaking from their own perspective.”

Hill says that working with Alvarez is notable for the collaborative process. “In so many shows, there’s a divide between the creative team and actors, or the behind-the-table and in-front-of-the-table, but the way that César tries to work is that everybody’s talking to everybody.”

Lucia Hartray ’27, a music major, had never heard of the Greensboro Massacre until she was an assistant stage manager for a reading of The Potluck at Dartmouth in 2025. Hartray, who wants to go into theater, took a songwriting class last year with Alvarez, who is also her adviser.

The history hadn’t “fully clicked in my head,” Hartray says. But when she “watched the rehearsals of the show and watched the full run-throughs, and actually had faces to put to the names of the people that were murdered, that really made it hit a lot harder for me. It was really impactful.”

Alvarez is also known for their sophisticated, imaginative lyric construction.

“A great deal of attention is rightly paid to the pressing, provocative, and political themes in César’s musicals, but the granular level of the lyrics deserves equal praise: the wit and wordplay of each idea-filled sung soliloquy makes for exhilarating listening," says Associate Professor of Music Richard Beaudoin.

Alvarez hopes to bring The Potluck home to Greensboro in 2029, the 50th anniversary of the massacre. The work draws attention, Alvarez says, to people who have dedicated their lives to redressing injustice and improving the human condition, often at terrible risk to themselves.

“Encountering their stories, to me, feels really inspiring and feels like a beacon for how we can be, and how we can think about being, in this time,” Alvarez says.