PRODUCTION OF CLASSIC 1955 PLAY IN CITY'S STATION NORTH DISTRICT IS METAPHOR FOR SOCIAL CHANGE http://voiceofbaltimore.org/archives/1183
Baltimore was a divided segregated city when Tennessee Williams' "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" debuted on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.
Blacks could not eat at public lunch counters in Charm City (and elsewhere in America) and didn't venture into upscale Guilford or even lowly Hampden. Residents of Polish descent confined themselves to Highlandtown and Canton; Jews were not allowed in Roland Park. Italians lived in Little Italy.
People of color didn't mix with whites except to work for them. ............
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So well in fact that audiences viewing Williams’ play at the Load of Fun Theater in the old North Avenue Market last weekend in the city’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District barely noticed, if at all, that the cast was racially mixed, that the parents of two white brothers were portrayed by black actors, that the patriarch of an upscale Southern family in the segregated 1950s was played by an African-American Baltimorean.
Percy W. Thomas, dean for external programs at Sojourner-Douglass College and artistic director of Heralds of Hope Theater, which produced the play — advertised as “a color-blind production of the Pulitzer Prize winning tale” — in concert with the Theatrical Mining Company, nearly stole the show as Big Daddy Pollitt, Williams’ doomed patriarch of a wealthy Mississippi Delta family who is dying of colon cancer but doesn’t know it because he’s been lied to by everyone around him.
Kicked in the ass, as it were, under the guise of being kind.
READ THE VOICE OF BALTIMORE STORY @ http://voiceofbaltimore.org/
So well in fact that audiences viewing Williams’ play at the Load of Fun Theater in the old North Avenue Market last weekend in the city’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District barely noticed, if at all, that the cast was racially mixed, that the parents of two white brothers were portrayed by black actors, that the patriarch of an upscale Southern family in the segregated 1950s was played by an African-American Baltimorean.
Percy W. Thomas, dean for external programs at Sojourner-Douglass College and artistic director of Heralds of Hope Theater, which produced the play — advertised as “a color-blind production of the Pulitzer Prize winning tale” — in concert with the Theatrical Mining Company, nearly stole the show as Big Daddy Pollitt, Williams’ doomed patriarch of a wealthy Mississippi Delta family who is dying of colon cancer but doesn’t know it because he’s been lied to by everyone around him.
Kicked in the ass, as it were, under the guise of being kind.
READ THE VOICE OF BALTIMORE STORY @ http://voiceofbaltimore.org/
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