| Contributed by
"William E. Emba"
This play is set in Pittsburgh, 1969. An economically depressed area
of the city is facing urban renewal, and the specter of eminent domain
seizure hangs over the main character's future. The other characters
discuss their plight and theorize about what makes for success, with
the most notable successes in their neighborhood being a flashy but
now deceased preacher and the funeral parlor director handling the
burial.
Along the way one character elaborates an exponential growth model to
explain how the white man has come to so completely exploit the black
man in recent history.
As a trivia note, the play premiered in New Haven with a cast including
Samuel Jackson and Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne continued with the
play in its 1992 Broadway production, for which he won a Tony Award.
(And to mathematically footnote the trivia, Fishburne's mother was a
math teacher.)
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