Consider the Wives of KKK Members

The Battle for Civil Rights

On September 15, 1963 a Ku Klux Klan bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama killing four African-American children and injuring 20 other people. First produced in 1987, The Stick Wife by Darrah Cloud explores the lives of three women married to men who would commit such a crime, as well as the men themselves.

At the center of the drama is Jessie Bliss, married to one of the perpetrators, Ed Bliss, a bitter unemployed man. As the play opens, he comes through the back door or their tar-paper roofed house into the yard to pull his clothes off the line to dress. She watches him with a sensual look, but when he turns to her, her face becomes as blank as his. She is afraid of him and yet still desires him. When she asks where he is going, he says nothing, and nothing that includes gentleness or kindness is what he has to offer.

Emotions Simmer and Burst

Priscilla Young Anker is brilliant as the tortured Jessie, a woman who has been beaten down by her husband and the society she lives in to the point that she is afraid to leave her house and spends her days spinning fantasies about being a Hollywood star while she hangs and rehangs white sheets. Whenever she begins to realize what her husband is up to, she reverts to her fantasies, being terrified of him and ashamed of him at the same time. She also expresses a steely determination when she has been away from Ed after his arrest, as if a huge weight has been lifted and she can be more of who she really is without the brutality of his presence.

Steve Jakiel is very believable as the cruel Ed. His self-loathing and underlying rage is apparent in his actions and the way he speaks to Jessie. David Marciniak as Big Albert Connor, and Andrew Salamone as Tom Pullet, his co-conspirators and Klan brothers are equally unsettling.

But this play belongs to the women. Christine Turturo plays the young wife of Tom, a woman who has dreams that she knows will not be fulfilled. She is afraid to be alone, afraid of “them,” and even more afraid of the larger world than of being the wife of a mentally disturbed, violent man. She is very effective in the role, as she defends her choices to Jessie. Kelly Meg Brennan is Betty Connor, who has chosen the bottle in order to maintain her sanity, being married to the bible-toting Tom. Her fussiness and halting way of moving, as if she is trying to not take up any space, speak to a woman who lives in the shadows.

Emotions simmer and then burst forth in this drama that is at once disturbing and fascinating in how it portrays the lives of the six people in this very emotion-driven play. By talking around the racism, hatred, and fear that permeates those lives, the play causes more than a little discomfort in the audience, as one wonders what will burst forth next. In addition, the use of the racist language of the time, said in such matter of fact ways, speaks to the depth of the racism that existed at the time, and unfortunately is still relevant today in many ways. The absurdity of the white sheets and the need for the people involved to feel important, using titles  like Imperial Wizard and Grand Dragon among many others, speaks to their underlying feelings of powerlessness in a changing world. 

A Window into Our Past

The set by Ron Schwartz is reminiscent of the trashy backyards one sees in run-down neighborhoods, with tires, old bicycles, various cans and boxes strewn around, a stained mattress leaning against the fence, and rusted corrugated roofing for a fence. Direction is by David Oliver, who is also the Artistic Director of this new theater, part of whose mission is to produce “lesser known and challenging existing scripts” as well devising original plays. This play certainly qualifies as challenging in a way that is thought-provoking and a reminder that there is still much work to be done in the matters of acceptance and inclusion.

Birmingham was a violent, tense, racist city at the time of the bombings. While the culture itself came under heavy scrutiny, The Stick Wife opens a window into the lives of some of the individuals who were a part of that culture.