JOAN ROSS SORKIN   


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Plays by Joan Ross Sorkin

JOAN ROSS SORKIN
(mis)Understanding Mammy: The Hattie McDaniel Story
1st Produced:
Theater Five, NY
2007
Company:
Emerging Artists Theatre
1st Published:
-
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To Buy This Play:
I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com
or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page
Genre:
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Play with Music
Parts:
Male
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Female
1
Parts Other:
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Notes: -
Synopsis: a play with music that reveals a side of Hattie McDaniel's life that few people knew. Hattie achieved stardom by becoming the first African American to win an Academy Award, but she paid a high price for fame. By playing a succession of maids and cooks, most notably Mammy in Gone With the Wind, she became the target of an unrelenting campaign against "Mammyism" led by Walter White of the NAACP, who thought her roles were shameful and degrading to their race. Despite her own efforts to bring dignity and humanity to her roles, within seven years of winning her Oscar, her film career was virtually destroyed. The play is set in 1952 at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodlands Hills, California, where Hattie is battling breast cancer. In her weakened state of mind, she imagines that Walter White has come to visit her and possibly reconcile their differences. For the first time Hattie directly confronts her most vocal critic to prove to him that she was in fact a credit to her race. In recounting her miraculous life story as the daughter of a slave who became a world-renowned movie star, Hattie proudly illuminates a life that was too often misunderstood.
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