Theater in English…Word for Word!
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Aunt Penny (Margo Hall), Miss Agatha (Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe) and Bertha (Velina Brown) pay a visit. Photo by Julie Schuchard
WORD FOR WORD, the theater company from San Francisco which transforms short stories into great theater will be presenting ”All Aunt Hagar’s Children” by Edward P. Jones. Directed by Stephanie Hunt. Assistant Director Margo Hall.Set in 1950s Washington, D.C., this Noir tale spotlights a young Korean War vet who sets out to solve a murder and becomes entangled in a web of family history. Along the way, he is unsettled by another death—a young woman whose last words haunt him and his investigation. Edward P. Jones evokes a neighborhood of vivid characters, telling a story about the strength of family and the choices that shape our lives.Edward Paul Jones was born on October 5, 1950, in Arlington, Virginia. The only son of an illiterate hotel maid and kitchen worker, Jones grew up in his mother’s sphere because his father had drifted out of his life when he was a preschooler. His interest in literature was sparked early, yet it was some time before he realized that African Americans, like their white counterparts, were writing works of literary merit. For more than a decade Jones worked full time as a freelance columnist and proofreader for Tax Notes. It was tedious work and thus left room for his imagination to wander to other topics. Finally Jones let his imagination run free and started mentally plotting in intricate detail the story of Henry Townsend, a Virginia slave who buys his freedom and then becomes a slave owner himself. However, this novel, told in omniscient point of view and in a nonlinear form, is more than the tale of Townsend. Townsend is the pivotal character around which the stories of myriad other characters revolve. In 2004, The Known World won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
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