by John O'Keefe-Odom
AgXphoto.info
Miss Evers tells her patient some kind of truth.
Just how much should you tell someone about the pain before they get their first spinal tap at the hands of an inexperienced doctor?
Would you tell them less if they were an illiterate farmer? How smart is the stupid man? That man we look down upon, what is his life worth?
Miss Evers' Boys, a play about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, challenges audiences with some timeless questions about the value of the life of a man when his contemporaries might count his life as worthless or expendable.
The play is set in the deep South, long before the Civil Rights Era. There's evident racism. We see the Tuskegee experiments happening. We know that since then, many societal changes have occurred. The play is not a news flash. We've heard of these events.
Yet, those events are the foundation for presenting some ancient problems and conflicts. We see arrogant people, full of themselves and selfish, doing what they think is good, manipulating others to death.
Miss Evers, is she a protagonist coming to grips with a struggle? What's her tough choice? Or, is she a villain and appeaser, who ignores and excuses the corrosion of humanity that's thrust in front of her face every day?
So Happy to Receive Their Treatments
If a man risks his life to conserve yours, is it right to pay him little if he begins the race to save you by being poor? How close to the trash pile should we bury someone who is expendable? How much are our lives worth if we choose to treat someone else as an experimental animal?
How are we lied to, to death?
Miss Evers' Boys explores the story of some poor black farmers from Macon, Alabama, who were given not just experimental, but placebo, treatments as they suffered from syphilis.
Perhaps we forget just how destructive and lethal syphilis has been. It's the pain, the mortality and the horror of slow decay unto death that Destiny reminds us of in this history play.
There's some dark humor in there. Watch for men with syphilis flirting with nurses. Do we notice? The flirting or the syphilis?
If we heard someone with a sexually transmitted and lethal disease flirting with a nurse, but we gave that disease and that man who had it a name that was more in contemporary vogue: would we notice this flirting more?
Did we forget the value of life because it was past due or unfashionable? Ask yourself: what dominates these scenes? Men being men, or men carrying the pall of lethal disease?
How much have we forgotten about syphilis and how we treat the diseased? Do we just rationally dismiss their natural desires and normal feelings with our conclusion that they are doomed to die?
Pride and Options.
In one scene we hear the pride of naming this great scientific study. Destiny shows the academic gloss given to professional hubris. Meanwhile, the welfare of the men in the study goes unaddressed beyond the most meagre compensation.
Three generations after slavery, has the poorest made a step up?
Have they progressed far? In the play we see the poor black farmer not considered completely worthless: he merited being buried next to, not in the pile of, the community's trash.
One step away from trash. His corpse given a thrifty burial in a reused sack. Was mankind as fair to these men as it was to others?
How high, how noble, must a man's birth be, in the eyes of his contemporaries, before we owe him the respect of candid truth?
Destiny Theater Company shows Miss Evers' Boys in honor of Black History Month at the Ripple Theater on Brainerd Road. The Ripple is a few doors down from The Comedy Catch. Tickets are $16; performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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LOVE IT~
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