A More Perfect Union

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“It wasn’t as scary writing the piece—I knew what had to be in there,” Corriere told me later. “Sure, I knew I was taking a risk with some of the material, but the real scary part happened when I heard it read out loud for the first time. When it’s taken off the paper and put into mouths, it’s a much more dangerous play than I realized,” said the playwright. “I found myself almost wanting to soften it when I heard it out loud for the first time. I have to give the credit to the community, at least the community of actors performing the play, who said yes to telling these stories. They didn’t want to settle for sweetness. They wanted to tell the hard stuff, and to prove how far they’ve come and that they’re willing to go further. God, I’m lucky to write for people like this.”

But in Union, there’s still an elephant in the room: Susan Smith. Corriere said few people ever brought her up in conversation. What did come up was story upon story about good parenting. One story, however, wasn’t so nice. A character named Robert resists, but eventually pours out the desperate tale of his own childhood abuse, of a mother who didn’t love him, beat him, emotionally strafed him for no reason, and lied to authorities about his age to send him off to war at 15, telling him not to come back if he lived. Later in the play, a multigenerational circle of black women are sitting and sewing, led by Janie Goree, the 82-year-old mayor of nearby Carlisle. She talks of her slave grandmother who bought her own freedom, yet remained on the plantation to be with her children. The women all remark on this example of mother love. Robert then reappears in the woods, raises the washpot above his head, and says, finally, “I forgive you.” And with this, maybe Union forgave Susan Smith.

This is an intimate theater of place. Its potent impact is derived from its truth, the resonance of shared ordeals and delights, its portrait of a place like no other. For an audience member who is not a local, who doesn’t know the cast or its family secrets, this work has another impact: the rich pleasure of seeing any town on the stage in all its naked diversity, struggling to make art together. And that spark is already igniting a fire. Boogaloo Broadcasting Company, the nonprofit that produces Washpot, has purchased the ruins of the burned-down textile mill that used to nurture and own this community. They plan to turn it into a theater and museum. Washpot is scheduled to be revived in 2003.

Once in a while in my travels, I see graffiti scrawled on a wall somewhere: “Art Saves Lives.” I feel in my bones it is true. Even if Turn the Washpot Down doesn’t save Union’s life, it has already saved its soul.

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