Building with character

NEWTON -- As a young woman, Katherine Butler Jones was swimming in a lake in upstate New York when she was summarily ordered out of the water because she was black. Her mother wrote her a letter after the incident, telling her she had a good legal case, adding, "Thurgood in 9E would be able to help."

That would be their neighbor Thurgood Marshall, later to become the first African-American US Supreme Court justice. He and many other members of the black elite lived in the same Harlem apartment building -- W.E.B. DuBois , the intellectual and political activ i st; Walter White , executive secretary of the NAACP; and Eunice Carter , who became the first black woman assistant district attorney in the state of New York. The building at 409 Edgecombe Ave. was given landmark status in 1993.

Jones's family has had an apartment there for 70 years. And now she's written a play about events in the '30s at that famed address: "409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill." Up You Mighty Race Performing Arts Company presents the debut production of the play, directed by producing artistic director Akiba Abaka at Boston Center for the Arts, starting tomorrow.

Interviewed at her dining room table in her brick house across from Newton City Hall, Jones says she's long been fascinated by the history of "409," as it's known to many in the African-American community nationwide . After finding a framed copy of her great-great-grandparents' marriage certificate in the apartment in 1989, she started researching the building.

One resident who lived there in the 1930s seemed particularly compelling: The millionaire businesswoman Madame Stephanie St. Clair, dubbed "The Numbers Queen," who was known for running the numbers racket in Harlem -- and for staving off the powerful racketeer Dutch Schultz , who wanted the territory. "She took a stand," says Jones. "She controlled Harlem."

Jones's play centers on St. Clair. "If you think about the times she lived and the role women played," says Jones, who's just returned home from rehearsal, "she had a commitment to community. She built immigration centers where people could learn English. She came from Martinique and she was very smart. Talk about marketing -- she took an advertisement in the Amsterdam News with a picture of herself every week and wrote a column."

Jones says people at the time wondered how she got her ability to lead men and succeed in a cutthroat business.

"She wears an amulet that she thinks protects her," Jones says. "Does that protect her? Does that give her the strength to go on and do what she does?"

If Schultz was one threat, an equally large one existed right in her own building: Carter, who decried the illegality of bookmaking. In the play, the two are sworn enemies. But after St. Clair (played by Fulani Haynes ) shoots her philandering husband, a labor organizer, Carter (Christina Bynoe ) represents her in her trial.

Jones sets the play in the lobby and incorporates some usually unrecognized figures: An elevator boy, janitor, and hairdresser are among the 10 characters. "409 Edgecombe Ave.," says Jones, "represents a vertical community, where people of all walks of life and economic circumstances interact."

This is the first play for Jones, who may be better known as a Mount Holyoke - and Harvard-educated human services advocate and educator, the founder of the METCO busing program, and the wife of civic leader Hubert Eugene "Hubie" Jones. She is the mother of eight children.

"I am an historian," Jones says. "My career has been in education, at all different levels. I see writing and creative writing and memoir and historical writing as a way of sharing information."

After gathering notes for several years, Jones began taking playwriting classes at ACT Roxbury, studying with playwrights Ed Bullins, Kate Snodgrass, and Lydia Diamond . Her script was given a staged reading by Abaka, who told her she wanted to produce it.

"I was initially interested in the voices of the elevator operator and the doorman," says Abaka. "The play uses them as a chorus, her mouthpiece to comment on the building and all it stands for. I thought they were great theatrical characters. What made me want to produce the play is the notion of a black woman gangster in the '30s who led an all-male operation. Her operation was the numbers, which is mostly nonviolent and harmless, but she gave so much to help her community. I thought, that's the story."

Jones says the cast traveled to the building and had an opportunity to see her apartment: "It was a wonderful thing for them to get a feeling of what it was like. The furniture is still the same. They had a tour of Harlem, led by a board member of the building.

"In the beginning of the play," Jones says, "a woman sits onstage and says, 'I sense those people all around me. Spirits command the hallway. ' "

"409 Edgecombe Avenue: The House on Sugar Hill" runs tomorrow through April 21 at Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre. Tickets: $24-$30. (Tomorrow

night is a benefit, $55, and April 18 is Pay What You Can Night, $5 minimum.) 617-933-8600, bostontheatrescene.com.

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.