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Our Hats off Adams County Board of Supervisors
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NATIVE SON by Richard Wright and Paul Green based on the novel by Richard Wright Friday, February 22, 2008, AT
8:00 P.M.
Saturday, February 23, 2008, AT
7:30 P.M. All performances will be at The Natchez Little Theatre 319 Linton Avenue at Myrtle Street. Produced in cooperation with the Natchez Literary & Cinema Celebration’s Richard Wright Centennial Celebration Directed by Layne Taylor Scenic design by Tommy Jackson
Call Natchez Little Theatre at 601.442.2233 or Toll Free at 1.877.440.2233 for Reservations. Email reservations: natchez@bellsouth.net ALL TICKETS: $15 Richard Wright’s landmark novel about racism, class and economic inequality, Native Son, was originally published in 1940. It was the centerpiece of numerous public programs that inspired dialogue about poverty, power and the state of race relations in America . Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents had been slaves and his father, Nathaniel, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, staying often at homes of relatives. His mother, Ella Wilson, was a schoolteacher; she moved with her family to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. In 1940 Wright's Native Son became an instant best-seller. In some bookstores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks. Many white Americans saw Bigger Thomas, the central character, as a symbol of the entire black community, and Wright later stated that "there are meanings in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper." Wright collaborated with Paul Green on a stage adaptation of the book, which was directed by Orson Welles and ran successfully on Broadway in 1941-43. The protagonist of Native Son is a young black man in Chicago, Bigger
Thomas, who lives in a one-room apartment in Chicago's South Side Black Belt,
with his mother, his young sister, Vera, and younger brother, Buddy. He is hired
by a wealthy family named Dalton as their chauffeur. Mr. Dalton gives money for
social welfare, but at the same time owns the rat-infested building in which
Bigger lives. The rhythms of Bigger's life are "indifference and violence;
periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence
and moments of anger - like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away,
invisible force." The family's free-thinking daughter Mary befriends him - with
her he visits Communist headquarters, where she meets her boyfriend Jan Erlone.
Mary has had too much drink. Bigger carries Mary back to her room. When her
blind mother enters the room, he accidentally smothers her. In panic, he burns
the body in the basement and attempt to implicate Jan. Mary's bones are
discovered. He is captured and feels for the first time a sense of freedom:
"Seems sort of natural-like, me being here facing that death chair. Now I come
to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be."
The Photo's in this next gallery were contributed by www.bycage.com
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Natchez Little Theatre |
