Vineyard Theatre Artistic Directors Douglas Aibel and Sarah Stern announce the company’s second original cast benefit reading, reuniting renowned actors Joe Morton (“Scandal”) and Sally Murphy (August: Osage County) for Oppenheimer Award-winning playwright and poet Cornelius Eady’s (Vineyard’s You Don’t Miss The Water) play, Brutal Imagination. Directed by Joe Morton, this digitally-staged reading includes video design by Jared Mezzocchi and is available for on demand streaming from May 20 – June 3.
Twenty years after first premiering at The Vineyard in 2001, Brutal Imagination remains a potent examination of racial attitudes in America. The play is based on Eady’s poem cycle which explores the notorious 1994 incident in which Susan Smith, a white woman from South Carolina, claimed that a Black man had kidnapped her children. The FBI searched for the man until Smith confessed that she had invented him and had in fact drowned her children. Brutal Imagination, two voices inside one consciousness, brings this invented man to life.
