Synopses & Reviews
An acclaimed novelist and poet, as well as the librettist for the opera Malcolm X, Thulani Davis is one of our most acclaimed and provocative writers, and now she takes aim at a national scandal that rocked a tiny Florida town in 1952, when a black woman named Ruby McCollum murdered her white employer. But Ruby's act was not one of simple black and white -- her victim had been her lover, and the unraveling of her motives and their relationship revealed not a simple cold-blooded murder or crime of passion but something far more complicated and insidious. Through the eyes of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston -- who covered Ruby's trial, confronting lies, secrecy, and good old-fashioned racism -- Thulani Davis has told an important story of race and sex in America. An engrossing piece of theater with a manifest compassion. -- Peter Marks, The New York Times [An] intriguing and ambitious new play ... [that] demonstrates that the truth can be a lot more complicated than fiction. -- David Kaufman, New York Daily News