Description
America’s slaves were freed within two years of the emancipation of serfs in Russia. Strange Fruit reimagines Chekhov’s masterpiece in Post-Civil War Georgia. A generation of former planters and slaves spends a summer speculating on the future of the family plantation – and the shadow it has cast on them all.
The setting is a Plantation House, near Macon, Georgia. The year is 1876, a decade on from the American Civil War, the final year of the Reconstruction Period and the Northern Army’s occupation of the ‘Confederate States’. The years to come will bring a murderous backlash against Blacks and establish the institutional racism of the Jim Crow South, hence the homage to Abel Meeropol’s chilling poem in our title, Strange Fruit.
As the play opens, Georgia is recovering from economic ruin through the expansion of the railroad, the efforts of a new entrepreneurial class and a burgeoning tourist industry. The links with Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard are so strong that this version mirrors closely his characters, plot line and – as the man himself would want emphasised – sense of humour.
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