Hymn to the Rising Sun

Barbara Montgomery directs this play by Paul Green in honor of Black History Month. A North Carolina prison’s chain gang and its cruel warden serve as a microcosm of fate and social justice in America. Hymn to the Rising Sun, set on the Fourth of July, depicts a stockade populated with a mixture of Black and White convicts and run by a sadistic, whip-toting Captain. The convicts struggle against their own helplessness as they face the impending death of a fellow inmate, a black man named Runt, who has been locked eleven days in a sweatbox for “messing with his private organs.”