Guy van Swearingen Archives

In the foreground on the left, a white man in white shirt, suspenders, and tan trousers faces a Black woman in a 1950s-style blue dress. Behind them on the left we see a Black man, also in shirt, trousers, and suspenders, and a white woman in a brown suit dress, looking at the argument unfolding between the two characters in the foreground.

She sees you, white American theater

by Kerry Reid November 17, 2022August 31, 2023

Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind made its off-Broadway debut in 1955, but it never made the leap to the Great White Way (emphasis most definitely on “White”). The white producers demanded that Childress give her story about racism in the American theater a happier ending depicting racial harmony. (Pause for irony.) Childress refused at first, […]

Young Asian woman on left in pink dress, older white woman in maid outfit looming over her on sofa in front of fireplace

Theater Review

Sinister spinsters

by Kerry Reid January 19, 2022January 19, 2022

Jen Silverman’s The Moors is a brilliantly executed pastiche of everything from Wuthering Heights (the gloomy insalubrious environs of the title) to Rebecca, complete with a menacing parlor maid/scullery maid named either Marjory or Mallory, and suffering from either an unwanted pregnancy or typhus, depending on what room you catch her in. (Played to perfection […]