About This Show
In 1939, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was published; Great Britain and France declared war on Germany when Poland was invaded; the films The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind premiered; and Billie Holiday sang, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.” In the new drama Antebellum, the similarities of the American South and Germany in the 1930s are explored when a woman shows up on a farm outside Atlanta while a world away, a man shows up in a detention center outside Berlin, and a romance unfolds.
Commissioned by Emory University’s Brave New Works Festival and developed through the 2005 Eugene O’Neill Theater Festival, Antebellum explodes the sexual, racial, and politically vicious “extravagances” of the late 1930s in America and Germany. This workshop production is written and directed by Robert O’Hara, Theatre School visiting diversity faculty member and New York director/playwright.
