A poignant juxtaposition has Alma sipping white wine in the club car of the train going to New York, while Eugene is drinking bourbon in the parking lot of the train station from which he reluctantly sent her off. He adjusts as best he can, going to visit her every month, though he still wishes she'd settle down back home with him.

Black-and-white photographic projections, typically of hands or the couple kissing, enhance the mood beautifully in Seitu Jones's set design, especially when images break into abstraction behind a gauzy scrim. Stage left, numerous objects such as dolls and flowers become a memory bank for the play to draw from.

Playwright Dael Orlandersmith is female, though I wasn't aware of that from her given name. That uncertainty prompted the question of whether the play presents more of a male or a female sensibility. You may disagree, but the insights seemed to me fairly balanced. So too with universalizing the central concern of the play, which could come across as a strictly African-American problem. We are led to empathize with these people as human beings, after all, and we don't use our eyes for that spectrum.

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    Historian Charles L. Mee is also a playwright with a lengthy list of works to his credit, but he could more accurately be called an anti-playwright. Having declared that “there is no such thing as an original play,” he has proceeded, typically, to assemble and reconstruct theater pieces from found texts.
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