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Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Waterford, CT, USA >>>

2000

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Dramatists Play Service, NY,

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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

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Play/Drama

2

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2g

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Halifax, North Carolina is where the Cheeks family, Rawl and his wife, Mattie, and their two daughters, makes its home. The year is 1949, and the title refers to signs commonly posted in the region in that era. The Cheeks are visited by Yaveni, a Jewish scholar from Cleveland, who is researching the effects of prejudice on both blacks and Jews, and by Aunt Cora, a mysterious local black woman who wanders around wrapped in a black garment with a dark secret. The trouble begins in earnest when Rawl takes off for Alabama to work as a gravedigger. While he is gone, Mattie is raped by a white man. If she tells Rawl she's pregnant, she knows that he will seek revenge and be killed in the process. So, in order to save his life, she tells him that she willingly participated in an affair. Outraged and devastated, Rawl heads north, and Mattie is left to pick up the pieces of her fractured life and to struggle to find a way to put her family back together. With a woman of her strength and determination, it may just even be possible.

Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Waterford, CT, USA >>>

1995

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American Theatre Magazine, NY - February, 1999

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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Comedy Drama

Comedy

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3

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In World War II Harlem, New York, a fifty-five-year-old spinster (or as they were called in those daysan Old Settler), Elizabeth Borny, takes in a young male roomer, Husband Witherspoon, to help her with the rent. Husband has come to Harlem from South Carolina to search for his girlfriend, Lou Bessie Preston. Also living with Elizabeth is her sister, Quilly McGrath, fifty-three. There is an ominous cloud of tension that hangs over Elizabeth and Quilly's relationship. This tension is further exacerbated when Elizabeth and Husband take to liking each other. Quilly, who doesn't like Husband living with them in the first place, surely doesn't approve of their "carrying on," especially since Elizabeth is old enough to be Husband's mother. It is this "carrying on" that exposes a thirty-year-old wound which, until now, only had a bandagenow the wound can heal for the sisters