It deals with Durham, North Carolina in the seventies when the town, and much of the south, was divided by racial and economic tension.
Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis were on opposite sides of the problem. Ellis held a high office in the local Ku Klux Klan, Mrs. Atwater was a poor working black woman. Bill Riddick came into town to help relieve the tensions and to begin to desegregate the schools. By chance, Mr. Riddick and his wife were seated next to me tonight in Row C. Mrs. Atwater was also present. Mr. Ellis died a few years ago.
Mr. Riddick somehow persuaded Mrs. Atwater and Mr. Ellis to co-chair the committee to discuss and decide how the local schools could be integrated.
I call it a piece for the theatre rather that a play because it unfolds as a series of vignettes that begin with Mrs. Atwater and Mr. Ellis at sword's point and ends with them the best of friends. He was hated by his fellow Klansman and tore up his membership card in public at the end of their work together. It is a very strong and emotional evening of theatre.
Aisha Hinds as Ann Atwater is a powerful actress portraying this amazing woman with strength and fervor. 
John Bedford Lloyd was equally strong as C. P. Ellis who began as an Exalted Something in the Ku Klux Klan, eventually tore up his membership card after being shunned by many of the white townsfolk, losing most of his white friends, losing his wife to death, his gas station, and winding up as a janitor. He eventually tried to slash his wrists to kill himself. It was at this point that Ann Atwater came to the hospital to see him and give him courage to continue his life. They became life-long friends.
Clifton Duncan and Susan Wands were excellent as Bill Riddick and Mary Ellis, C. P.'s wife.
All in all it was an emotional evening in the theatre. It's not quite a play, but that doesn't seem to matter. At the end of the evening Aisha Hinds, as Ann Atwater, tells of going to C.P.'s funeral, the only black person there. She is told that the service is for family members only. When asked if she is a family member, she emotionally says, 'Yes. He's my brother.'
Trust me. There was not a dry eye in the house.
The emotional hit you get from this play that is not quite a play is that every word of it is true. These were real people and real events that took place.
In 1952 John and I attended the wedding of two very dear friends in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We saw public restrooms and drinking fountains that were labeled 'White Only' and 'Colored Only'. Twenty years later, at the time of this play, race relations were worse than they had been on that trip because by then laws had been passed to rid our country of this stigmata. But not much had changed.
Today a black man sits in the White House. Many people in this country and a good percentage of our Congress oppose everything that he suggests not just because they disagree politically, but, in my opinion, because he is black.
We still have quite a way to go, haven't we?
