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Tobacco Road by Jack Kirkland, Is Set in a Desolate Farm County in Georgia

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Tobacco Road by Jack Kirkland, Is Set in a Desolate Farm County in Georgia SHOW GUIDE Inside Dear Educators THE PLAY Synopsis, Characters, Setting 2 Wayne State University is proud to produce plays for young people’s Inspiration, Production History 3 enjoyment and to actively explore the beauty, diversity, complexity and challenges of the world around them through the dramatic THE CREATORS arts. We wish to support the development of their creative voice, The Playwright 4 imagination, and understanding of drama and its role in our global society. CURRICULUM SUPPORT Activities presented assist in achieving the Michigan Common Core State Standards (MI-CCSS) This play guide is designed to be a tool in helping you prepare Speaking and Listening 5-6 your students for our performance as well as extend the production Writing 6-7 experience back into the classroom. History/Social Studies 7 Differentiated Learning Activities 8 Activities presented assist in achieving the Michigan Common Core State Standards (MI-CCSS). THE THEATRE Location and Seating 9 Your comments and suggestions about this guide, presentation First Time Visitor’s Guide 10 and/or programming are welcome. Email [email protected]. MORE TO SEE 11 Your Students’ Role You may wish to have a discussion with your students before attending the play. Remind your students that they have an important role to play at the performance being the audience. It is because of the audience that the theatre exists. It will be their energy and response that will directly affect the actors onstage. Young audiences should be reminded that live theatre is not like watching TV, a movie or DVD; the actors cannot pause or be rewound, there are no commercial breaks for running to the bathroom, the volume cannot be turned up to hear better if someone other than the actors are talking. Encourage your students to listen and watch the play. They can laugh and cheer for their favorite characters. At the end of the play, applause is appropriate and is the opportunity for your students to thank the actors while the actors are thanking you for the role you played as the audience. Theatre and Dance at Wayne SHOW GUIDE Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance Copyright 2018 College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY DRAMATURG Meccah Martin GRAPHIC DESIGN Thomas Karr BOX OFFICE Hilberry Theatre, 4743 Cass Ave., Detroit, MI 48202 313-577-2972 ADMINISTRATION 4841 Cass Ave., Ste. 3206, Detroit, MI 48202 313-577-3508 All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by teachers and MARKETING 4841 Cass Ave., Ste. 3206, Detroit, MI 48202 313-577-3010 individual personal use, no part of this Show Guide may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval John Wolf, Chair and Executive Producer system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials published herein are written especially for our Guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their publishers. theatreanddanceatwayne.com | theatreanddance.wayne.edu The Play Synopsis Characters Tobacco Road by Jack Kirkland, is set in a desolate farm county in Georgia. The profitable Jeeter Lester tobacco crop has given way to cotton plantations, but poor planting practices have depleted the soil. The Lester family were once sharecroppers, but are now poverty-stricken and unable Ellie May Lester to cope with the bleak life they face. Jeeter Lester, the patriarch, lives in squalor with his wife Ada, their two children, 16-year-old Dude and 18-year-old Ellie May, and his mother. Ada is Dude Lester suffering from pellagra and Ellie May has a harelip, Jeeter and Dude are thin and emaciated, and the family wears tattered clothing. Ada Lester Sister Bessie Rice, a stout preacher of about forty, decides to marry Dude, who agrees when Capt. Tim Harmon she promises to buy him a car. When Capt. Tim Harmon tells the family that the house and property are owned by the bank, Jeeter is given a chance to earn money so that they may Granma Lester keep living there, but he refuses. Sister Bessie Rice The youngest daughter Pearl tries to escape from her much older husband Lov Bensey, but Ada is run over by Dude’s car as she attempts to help Pearl. As Ada lies dying, Pearl escapes Lov Bensey and runs away; Jeeter sends Ellie May to Lov instead. Pearl The photographs below by photojournalist, Dorothea Lange, reveal the hard life of families who were sharecroppers in rural Georgia in 1937. She included the comments with the photographs. Pictured: Landless family of cotton sharecroppers, Macon County, Georgia. For their labor they receive half the crop they produce, and the equivalent of ten dollars a month “furnish” (credit) from the landlord. Their vegetable garden failed this year for lack of rain. SHOW GUIDE • 2 The Play Production History 48th Street Theatre The John Golden Theatre Tobacco Road premiered on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, formally known as the Theatre Masque, on December 4, 1933. The production transferred to the 48th Street Theatre, where it ran from July 16, 1934 through September 1934, and then moved to the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, formally known as the Forrest Theatre, where it ran for a total of 3,182 performances until May 31, 1941. It was revived three times on Broadway: • From September 5 through October 3, 1942, at the Forrest Theatre. • September 4 through October 30, 1943, at the Ritz Theatre. • March 6 through March 18, 1950, at the 48th Street Theatre. Ritz Theatre Although, the production found popularity toward Broadway audiences, it was banned in the United Kingdom for many years, until it was finally licensed for public performance in 1949. The La Jolla Playhouse, located in California, production ran from September 30 through October 26, 2008. The American Blues Theater, located in Chicago, production ran from SHOW GUIDE • 3 May 21 through June 20, 2010. The Creator Playwright Jack Krikland and themselves. The novelistic treatment is comic, the structure is episodic, and the rural southern types appear childish, grotesque, Jack Kirkland was born July 25, 1902 in St. Louis, Missouri. As an and, ultimately, pathetic. American playwright, producer, director and screenwriter Kirkland’s greatest success was the play Tobacco Road, adapted from the Erskine In 1933, Tobacco Road was dramatized and ran for a record-breaking Caldwell novel. His other plays included Frankie and Johnny, Tortilla seven years on Broadway, despite an obscenity charge that was Flats, Suds In Your Eye, Mr. Adam, Man with the Golden Arm, and brought against it by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Mandingo. The charge was dismissed, as was a similar charge against Caldwell’s next novel, God’s Little Acre (1933), the story of Ty Ty Walden, a Kirkland collaborated with Melville Baker on several screen projects Georgia dirt farmer, and his sons and daughters, and the barren, including Zoo in Budapest (1933) starring Loretta Young and Gene useless acre of land that he dedicates to God. As in Tobacco Road, Raymond, Now and Forever (1934) starring Gary Cooper, Carole Caldwell’s theme is the folly and promiscuity of rural southerners. Lombard and Shirley Temple, and The Gilded Lily (1935) starring God’s Little Acre is one of the all-time best sellers in the history of Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray and Ray Milland. book publishing. On February 22, 1969 Kirkland passed away in New York City leaving In the mid-1930s Caldwell spent some years as a Hollywood script behind several children, one of whom was the ballerina Gelsey writer but continued his amazing book production. After a play, Kirkland. Journeyman (1935), he wrote Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other Stories (1935), The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1936), and Southways Background on American Writer, Erskine Caldwell (1938). Two of Caldwell’s best-selling novels appeared in the early 1940s, Trouble in July (1940) and Georgia Boy (1943). In 1942, Caldwell married his third wife, June Johnson, with whom he had a son. His postwar works included The Sure Hand of God (1947), Episode in Palmetto (1950), and A Lamp for Nightfall (1952). Caldwell’s later books failed to generate the excitement of his earlier works, but he had earned his niche as a serious if sensational regionalist. In 1982, the New American Library marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Tobacco Road by releasing it and God’s Little Acre in new paperback editions. In 1984, Caldwell was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1985, the Georgia Endowment for the Humanities invited him back to his native state for a series of teas and lectures in his honor. After his visit, Caldwell took note of the many economic and social changes Erskine Caldwell was born in backwoods Coweta Country, in the that had taken place in the once destitute rural south. town of White Oak, Georgia, on Dec. 17, 1903. His father was a Presbyterian minister, and the family moved frequently throughout Shortly before his death, Caldwell completed his autobiography, the South. Caldwell’s schooling was fragmentary; he attended With All My Might (1987). A heavy smoker for all of his adult life, high school sporadically and took college courses at the University Caldwell twice underwent surgery for the removal of portions of his of Pennsylvania, at Erskine College, in South Carolina, and at the lungs. Lung cancer finally overtook him on April 11, 1987 in Paradise University of Virginia. Valley, Arizona. His 1932 publication of Tobacco Road that assured Caldwell’s success. Erskine Caldwell Facts The novel depicts the life of Jeeter Lester, a Georgia sharecropper, and biography.yourdictionary.com/erskine-caldwell his family as they stumble through a series of sexual and financial misadventures, culminating in the destruction by fire of their home SHOW GUIDE • 4 Curriculum Support SPEAKING AND LISTENING [Sharing of any writing project orally in class will also fit under the Speaking and Listening Fun Fact! (SL) Standard] CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.1.1, 2.1 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade level topics and Tobacco Road txt with peers and adults in small and larger groups.
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