From the Mississippi Delta at Road Less Traveled Theater

The Mississippi Delta… the birthplace of playwright Endesha Ida Mae Holland, and or as she refers to it in this staggering memoir: “a testament to African-American inferiority”.
A tumultuous cast of characters – matrons, preachers, drunks, good-time girls, carnival barkers, and freedom marchers, among others – circle the towering, tragic figures of Aint Baby (a laundress, midwife, and miracle worker) and her daughter, Phelia, who escapes sexual abuse at an early age into a life of stripping, prostitution, and ultimately the civil rights movement of the 1960?s. Through it all, Phelia recalls the inspiration of Ain’t Baby, who worked her way from the cotton fields (for $0.35 a day) to a position as a “Second Doctor Lady” to the community of white doctors who deferred to her midwifery skills. Buoyed by Aint Baby’s resilience and strength, Phelia escapes the killing fields of Greenwood, MI, earns academic triumphs, and finally achieves fame as an author.
In the play’s most potent moments, harrowing episodes are tempered with humor and tenderness. Calamities and indignities happen on “calm balmy days.” Watching Aint Baby delivering a woman’s thirteenth baby and saving the mother’s life is a moment of exhilaration for Phelia and for all of us. The three actresses who paint the portrait of Holland’s Mississippi break into earthy song at the least provocation, and even the saddest of their stories comes with a wry sense of humor; and the audience shares Phelia’s sense of horror and wonder as she struggles with a South that can be even warmer than the weather, then kill without warning or reason.