MY NAME IS HANNAH
Fifty years before receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a rebellious Jewish teenager from Manhattan spends one life-changing summer in rural West Virginia, where falling in love with a coal miner’s son forces them both to challenge the lives—and the prejudices—others have chosen for them.
sold out run at the Detroit Repertory Theater. “A bold new drama… Though set in 1968 its message about frustration simmering beneath the surface of polite relations makes it resonate today… The play packs a punch… It’s the women in SWEET PEA’S MAMA who stand out. They shine a light on racial politics in a way that more popular works like ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ can only dream of doing.” -- Detroit Free Press
Project Overview
In this coming of age story, Hannah Miller, a precocious Jewish teenager from Manhattan is sent against her will to expand her horizons with family in West Virginia in the summer of 1960. We also meet adult Hannah throughout the film, over fifty years later, during the course of an interview for an award ceremony honoring her life. My Name is Hannah is about young love, defying expectations and confronting prejudices we know and don’t know we have.
Teenage Hannah finds herself in a very rural town about to be visited by JFK during his presidential campaign. Feeling unheard, bitter and out of place, she is completely taken by surprise when she falls for a sweet and unassuming neighbor, Johnny, a budding artist and son of a coal miner.
When Hannah encourages Johnny to venture beyond imposed bounds and stake a claim on being an artist, she runs into a roadblock – his father Curtis. Beleaguered by the burden of raising his family on his own and grief-stricken by the recent loss of his wife, the plain-speaking Curtis fears losing Johnny to this “Jew girl from New York.”
The decisions the two teens make will set a course for their lives in the shadow of impending adulthood. Though confined in many ways all his life, Johnny embraces Hannah’s burgeoning maturity in ways that her own family ignores, even quashes. In turn, Hannah’s relationship with Johnny, and the way she emerges as a champion for someone so different, fosters her own growth and ultimate self-empowerment.
The entire story is rendered through the prism of adult Hannah, over 50 years later. On the eve of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom for championing young artists, Hannah Miller recounts—publicly for the first time—the story of Johnny, a coal miner’s son she believed in when they were teenagers in West Virginia during the summer of 1960.
