[NEohioPAL] Final Weekend! Flyin' West

[Janis Harcar]

Weathervane Playhouse...

Inspiring Historical Drama ‘Flyin’ West’ Celebrates Four Black Pioneer Women and their Quest for Freedom in the American West Warm Family Saga Illuminates the Rich History of Black Homesteaders

Final Weekend - Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday 2:30 p.m. (Closes. Feb. 23)

Directed by Jennifer Kay Jeter, Flyin’ West plays on Weathervane Playhouse’s Founders Theater stage from Feb. 7 to 24, 2013. The production is made possible with the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Set in 1898 outside the all-black town of Nicodemus, Kansas, Flyin’ West examines the lives, memories and hopes of four women – two former slaves and two free women – seeking a better life. But even in the free state of Kansas – and even away from the uncertainties of the post-Civil War South – the women find that their new surroundings are not free of danger and unexpected twists.

Flyin’ West playwright Pearl Cleage has shaped her fictional drama around the factual ramifications of the Homestead Act, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1862, the Homestead Act became the vehicle by which many freed slaves could seek their liberty and reach for a piece of the American Dream. The Homestead Act enabled any applicant to get, for $5.00 and a payment plan of 25 cents per payment, a single plot of roughly 160 acres on undeveloped federal land west of the Mississippi River. One year later, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of slaves (in 10 Confederate states then in rebellion against the Union). After the 13th Amendment was passed and adopted in 1865 – thus abolishing slavery – thousands of freed slaves sparked a movement West. These people came to be known as the Exodusters.

Former enslaved African Americans left the American South in organized groups at the end of the of post-Civil War Reconstruction period to experience freedom on the free soils of Kansas. The town of Nicodemus in Flyin’ West represents the involvement of African Americans in the western expansion and settlement of the Great Plains. Today, according the National Park Service, it is the oldest and only remaining all-black town west of the Mississippi River.

Weathervane Playhouse, in Akron's Merriman Valley
www.weathervaneplayhouse.com
330-836-2626 for tickets

Janis Harcar
Director of Advancement
Weathervane Playhouse
330-836-2626 X16
jharcar at weathervaneplayhouse.com



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