The story was focused on a traveling preacher, Purlie Victorious who returns to his small Georgia town hoping to save Big Bethel, the community’s church, and emancipate the cotton pickers who work on extremely oppressive  Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee’s plantation. With the assistance of Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins, Purlie hopes to pry loose from Cotchipee an inheritance due his long-lost cousin and use the money to save the church.  The story really did provide a wonderful vehicle to explore racism given birth in the plantations of the south.  It doesn’t hold back on the name calling, slavery references, and all manner of evil and inappropriate black stereotypes.  Everything about the play makes you feel uncomfortable with the racist American past.  This is when the play works best.

This production had a lot of trouble when it sought to be funny.  The character of Latiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins is a perfect example.  Mid-way the play, she has an incredible comic scene where she has to pretend to be another woman to eke out the inheritance money from Cotchipee.  Of course, she comically runs into obastacle after obstacle as she has trouble sustaining the lies –  – BUT Kara Young, the actress, was WORKING SO HARD TO BE FUNNY that she was missing so many of the laughs.  The more she tried to be funny the less effective she was.  I felt like standing up and saying, “Please cut 95% of what you are doing – trust the script – and all will be good.”

In the play’s final moments, Purlie Victorious/Leslie Odom is given a sermon to bring all the themes of the play together and frame all of the racist ideas into a potent warning to all who feel some individuals are more important – or more worthy than others.  In another example of overdoing it – he raced and bellowed and jumped around the stage and I just lost most of what he was saying – and trust me, I was working REAL hard to catch each word.  

In summary, I really liked this play and was really affected by the play when it “settled down” and I could understand it. I just wish the big scenes had been delivered with SOME finesse.