Tar River Players to stage ‘Pretty Fire’

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March 5, 2010

FOR THE DAILY SOUTHERNER The Daily Southerner Fri Mar 05, 2010, 11:22 AM EST

The Tar River Players will offer a one-weekend-only reader’s theater performance of Charlayne Woodard’s "Pretty Fire" on Friday through Sunday at McIntyre Auditorium.

"Pretty Fire" was first performed in 1993 and has gone on to win numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Drama Critic’s Circle Award and the NAACP Theater Award for best play.

"Pretty Fire" is told in five separate stories about the childhood of an exceptional black girl who shares the joys of deep familial love and the hardships and fears of growing up in the Jim Crow South. Much of the play is set in Savannah and is an openly autobiographical look at the wonder and harsh reality of growing up black in America.

The “pretty fire” of the title is a Klan cross-burning witnessed from a distance – a distance that allows the irony of seeing the ugliest of human behaviors as somehow pretty in a child’s eyes. But it would be a mistake to think of this play only as an examination of race and society.

In a letter to The New York Times, Woodard points out that her play “caters to neither a white audience nor to an African-American one.” She went on to say that it is “a universal journey through a world of loving mothers and fathers and grandparents who spoiled us silly.” Woodard also hopes that the play has a “healing effect” on the audience.

The Times itself calls "Pretty Fire" “one of the most positive pictures of the black-American experience I’ve ever seen on stage” and Newsday calls it “inspring, illuminating and engrossing.”

This Tar River Players’ production will be a reader’s theater, which means it will focus on the script and will not include the full stage production of other Tar River performances. But this play is ideally suited for this approach because its power is in Woodard’s playful yet intense storytelling.

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