Metropolitan Playhouse presents its next free "screened" readings, live-streamed at no charge, with talkback to follow: AFTERMATH, Mary P. Burrill, January 16, 2021 at 8 PM Eastern, available at www.metropolitanplayhouse.org.
The video will be available through Wednesday, January 20, 2021 on the Playhouse webpage, the Metropolitan Playhouse YouTube channel, and the Metropolitan Playhouse Facebook page.
John Thornton returns to his South Carolina family as a decorated hero on leave from duty in WWI. He finds them struggling to hold to their faith in the wake of the lynching of his beloved father, victim of an angry White mob following a trivial argument. But battle has taught John his own lessons about forgiveness and forbearance.
In one, tightly written act, Mary P.Burrill's short play digs deeply into issues of faith, patriotism, personal sacrifice, pacifism, mob mentality, and the bitter accommodations that preserve unjust social order. It is both a lament for the victims of entrenched power's abuses and a warning to the society that will not confront and own them.
Discussion including audience participation follow the readings, with special guest Koritha Mitchell, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Theater History, Dramaturgy, and Acting at the University of Missouri. Dr. Michell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching, editor of the Broadview Edition of Frances E.W. Harper's 1892 novel Iola Leroy, and author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. She is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University and a Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF) board member.
Directed by
Timothy Johnson (On Strivers Row, Compromise), the play features
Ryan Vincent Anderson, Anthony T. Goss, Linda Kuriloff, Nia Akilah Robinson,
Lawrence Winslow, and
Kim Yancey-Moore. Settings drawn by Pamela LAwton.
Mary Powell Burrill (1881- 1946) received a B.A. from Emerson Collecge in 1904, and there wroteher first play, Unto the Third and Fourth Generations: A One-Act Play of Negro Life, but through most of the rest of her life worked as teacher of English, speech, and dramatics at Dunbar High School in her home town of Washington DC. Three of her students became successful playwrights of their own:
May Miller, James W. Butcher Jr. and
Willis Richardson. Her best known works were published in 1919: They That Sit in Darkness was published in Margaret Sanger's progressive Birth Control Review, while Aftermath, was published in Liberator, and produced by New York City's Krigwa Players in 1928.
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