Playwright: Michael Bradford
At: ETA Creative Arts Center
Phone: ( 773 ) 752-3955; $25
Runs through: June 18
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
When the troops returned after World War I, a popular song lamented, 'How are you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paree?' But the refrain heard in 1950 by negro soldiers in the Georgia town of Durham asked how they were to stay on the back of the bus after fighting side by side with comrades of all colors and ancestries in Europe. When an affluent Black landowner is openly gunned down in the street by a white business competitor, both the local police and the habitués of Willy's barber shop sense that the response to this crime will not be the customary one.
The elderly know-it-all Harold and seen-it-all Sylvester have learned to accept the status quo, but worry about the reaction of the victim's brother, Quincey, a shell-shocked veteran. More ambivalent are the truculent Claude, the slow-witted Nate, the slick-talking ChiTown and the embittered Bennett, whose Boston education has elevated him no further than his home-town tonsorial parlor. Palpable influences also include the undertaker reluctant to fulfill his duties and the officer who sorrowfully instructs his men in civilian survival skills ( 'You can't take nothing with you. You go home just the way you came.' )
Playwright Michael Bradford errs neither on the side of dry didacticism or soppy sentimentality in portraying his period, instead immersing his arguments in the vernacular associated with males-at-leisure. Nor does the company assembled by director Derrick Sanders indulge itself in cheap caricature ( though the play's first moments might be slowed a bit until audiences acclimate to the dialects ) , but permit each character the dignity of his individual experience.
'This is how the world's made and everybody got place in this world. Even me, I got a place,' the doomed Durham sheriff declares, 'Some days I wish things was a bit different. But they ain't.' Willy's Cut And Shine is a vivid and intimate account, not so much of social inequities now well-documented, but the REALIZATION of those inequities—discovery that would, only a few years later, spark the civil-rights movement calling for the 'places' to be forever altered.