The Death of Bessie Smith

Last updated

The Death of Bessie Smith is a one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee, written in 1959 and premiered in West Berlin the following year. The play consists of a series of conversations between Bernie and his friend Jack, Jack and an off-stage Bessie, and black and white staff of a whites-only hospital in Memphis, Tennessee on the death date of the famous blues singer, Bessie Smith, who died in a car wreck.

Contents

Production history

The play premiered in West Berlin at the Schlosspark Theatre, Berlin, Germany on April 21, 1960. [1]

It premiered Off-Broadway at the York Playhouse on March 1, 1961, in a double bill with Albee's The American Dream. Directed by Lawrence Arrick, the nurse was played by Rae Allen, and Ben Piazza played "the young man". [2] [3]

The play opened on Broadway in repertory with other Albee plays, at the Billy Rose Theatre on October 2, 1968, for 12 performances. Directed by Michael Kahn, Rosemary Murphy played the nurse, and Ben Piazza played the intern. [4] [5]

The work was first staged in London's West End at the Royal Court Theatre in 1961 with Gene Anderson as the nurse, Tommy Eytle as Jack, Robert Ayres as the Father, Avril Elgar as the second nurse, and Richard Easton as the intern. [6]

In the original British Actors edition approved by the Lord Chamberlain for performance in Britain, the scene with the line My love is like a tent with the pole pointing upwards (i.e. an erection) was censored. [7]

As part of an Albee Festival, the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, presented The Death of Bessie Smith in 2003. [8]

New Brooklyn Theatre produced The Death of Bessie Smith in January 2014 at Interfaith Medical Center to raise awareness about several New York City hospitals in danger of closing. [9]

Plot overview

The play is set in 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee, in a segregated hospital and its surrounding grounds. [10]

The character of Bessie Smith is only referred to in Albee's play and does not appear on stage. In early performances, Albee did not even allow music or pictures of her to be used.

Historical accuracy

The incident upon which the play is based is a myth that was largely accepted as fact until convincing evidence to the contrary appeared in the original 1972 edition of Bessie, a biography of the singer. [11] Bessie Smith did indeed die following a car crash, but she was never refused admittance to a white hospital, which is the premise of Albee's play. She was taken directly to the Afro-American Hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where she died some seven hours later. The idea that she was refused entry to the whites-only hospital originated in an article by jazz writer and producer John Hammond in the November 1937 issue of Down Beat .

Characters

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Albee</span> American playwright (1928–2016)

Edward Franklin Albee III was an American playwright known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Three Tall Women (1994). Some critics have argued that some of his work constitutes an American variant of what Martin Esslin identified and named the Theater of the Absurd. Three of his plays won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two of his other works won the Tony Award for Best Play.

<i>Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i> 1962 play by Edward Albee

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play by Edward Albee first staged in October 1962. It examines the complexities of the marriage of a middle-aged couple, Martha and George. Late one evening, after a university faculty party, they receive an unwitting younger couple, Nick and Honey, as guests, and draw them into their bitter and frustrated relationship.

Bessie Smith was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the "Empress of the Blues", she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.

Three Tall Women is a 1990 two-act play by Edward Albee, which premiered at Vienna's English Theatre in 1991. It is about three women — a woman in her 90s, a woman in her 50s, and a woman in her 20s — who are unnamed in the play but referred to in the script as A, B and C. In the first act, B and C are a caretaker and lawyer for A, respectively, while in the second act they have become personifications of A from earlier in her life. The character of A, the oldest woman, is based in part on Albee's own mother.

<i>Carry On Nurse</i> 1959 film

Carry On Nurse is a 1959 British comedy film, the second in the series of 31 Carry On films (1958–1992). Of the regular team, it featured Joan Sims, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor and Charles Hawtrey, with Hattie Jacques and Leslie Phillips. The film was written by Norman Hudis based on the play Ring for Catty by Patrick Cargill and Jack Beale. It was the top-grossing film of 1959 in the United Kingdom and, with an audience of 10.4 million, had the highest cinema viewing of any of the "Carry On" films. Perhaps surprisingly, it was also highly successful in the United States, where it was reported that it played at some cinemas for three years. The film was followed by Carry On Teacher 1959.

The American Dream is an early, one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee. It premiered in 1961.

<i>The Zoo Story</i> One-act play by American playwright Edward Albee

The Zoo Story is a one-act play by American playwright Edward Albee. His first play, it was written in 1958 and completed in just three weeks. The play explores themes of isolation, loneliness, miscommunication as anathematization, social disparity and dehumanization in a materialistic world. Today, professional theatre companies can produce The Zoo Story either as a part of Edward Albee's at Home at the Zoo, or as a standalone play. Its prequel, Homelife, written in 2007, however, can only be produced as a part of Edward Albee's at Home at the Zoo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. F. Albee</span> American vaudeville impresario

Edward Franklin Albee II was an American vaudeville impresario.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Howard (actress)</span> American actress (1925–1993)

Jennifer Howard was an American stage and film actress active between the mid-1940s and early 1960s. She appeared in a number of classic television shows during the American Golden Age of Television and was also an accomplished watercolor and acrylic artist. She was the daughter of the playwright and screenwriter Sidney Howard and first wife of Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr.

The Sandbox is a play written by Edward Albee in 1959.

A Soldier's Play is a play by American playwright Charles Fuller. Set on a US Army installation in the segregation-era South, the play is a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, and follows the murder investigation of the Sergeant in an all-black unit. The play uses a murder mystery to explore the complicated feelings of anger and resentment that some African Americans have toward one another, and the ways in which many black Americans have absorbed white racist attitudes.

Harold Russell Scott Jr. was an American stage director, actor and educator, who broke racial barriers in American theatre. Scott first became known for his work as an electrifying stage actor with a piercing voice, and later as an innovative director of numerous productions throughout the country, from Broadway to the Tony Award-winning regional theatre, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where he was the first African-American artistic director in the history of American regional theatre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth White (actress)</span> American actress

Ruth Patricia White was an American actress who worked in theatre, film, and television. She won Emmy and Obie awards, and was a Tony Award nominee.

<i>Men in White</i> (play)

Men in White is a 1933 play written by American playwright Sidney Kingsley. It was produced by the Group Theatre, Sidney Harmon and James Ramsey Ullman, directed by Lee Strasberg with scenic design created by Mordecai Gorelik. It ran for 351 performances from September 26, 1933 to July 28, 1934 at the Broadhurst Theatre. The play won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Ayres (actor)</span> American actor

Robert Ayres was an American film, stage and television actor. He worked mainly in Britain.

All Over is a two-act play written in 1970 by Edward Albee. He had originally developed it in 1967 as a short play entitled Death, the second half of a projected double bill with another play called Life.

George Michael Bartenieff was a German-born American stage and film actor. He was noted both for his character roles in commercial and non-commercial films and on television, and for his work in the avant-garde theatre and performance world of downtown Manhattan, New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a co-founder of the Theatre for the New City, and of the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

Bette Joan Henritze was an American actress of stage, film, and television.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diamond Teeth Mary</span> American singer

"Diamond Teeth" Mary McClain was an American blues and gospel singer and vaudeville entertainer, whose career as a performer extended from the 1910s to the 1990s.

Gene Anderson was an English actress who had a career in television, film, and theatre from the early 1950s up until her death in 1965 at the age of 34. The first wife of actor Edward Judd, she is best known for her performances in the films The Long Haul (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). A main cast member of the 1950s British television dramas The Crime of the Century and A Mask for Alexis, she was a frequent guest actress on British television series in the 1950s and 1960s. Also active as a stage actress, she created the role of Marie Charlet in the world premiere of Pierre La Mure's Monsieur Toulouse at the Connaught Theatre in 1957 and performed the role of Euphrenia in the first modern revival of John Ford's 1633 tragedy The Broken Heart at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1962; a production directed by and starring Laurence Olivier. In the West End she portrayed the central role of the Nurse in the UK premiere of Edward Albee's The Death of Bessie Smith in 1961 and the role of Kate Croy in the 1963 West End adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove.

References

  1. ↑ Albee, Edward."The Death of Bessie Smith" The American Dream ; The Death of Bessie Smith ; Fam and Yam: Three Plays. Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1962, ISBN   0-8222-0030-9,pp.46-48
  2. ↑ Taubman, Howard. "Theatre: Intense Hour", The New York Times, March 2, 1961
  3. ↑ "'The Death of Bessie Smith', 1961" Internet Off-Broadway Database Listing, accessed March 7, 2011
  4. ↑ "The Death of Bessie Smith', 1968" Internet Broadway Database Listing, accessed March 7, 2011
  5. ↑ Sullivan, Dan."Theater: Albee's 'Bessie Smith' and 'Dream' Revived" The New York Times (abstract), October 3, 1968, p. 55
  6. ↑ Myro (November 8, 1961). "Legitimate: Shows Abroad - The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith". Variety . 224 (11): 72.
  7. ↑ Personal knowledge from a Canterbury University (NZ) production, I was the orderly, and had an American edition. The cuts were restored! ~~~~
  8. ↑ Weiss, Hedy."Article: Early Edward Albee one-acts get their due" Chicago Sun-Times (abstract), October 23, 2003
  9. ↑ Hartocollis, Anemona (8 January 2014). "A Play Is Set in a Hospital, in Two Ways". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 December 2018– via NYTimes.com.
  10. ↑ Stenz, Anita Maria.Bessie Smith' Edward Albee: The Poet of Loss, Walter de Gruyter, 1978, ISBN   90-279-7764-X, pp.14-24
  11. ↑ Bessie, by Chris Albertson (Yale University Press 2003).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.