Happy Ending & A Day of Absence

Mr Harrison has discovered his wife in an act of infidelity. The sisters fear that if the marriage breaks up they will be both out of a job

Their nephew, Junie, chides them for their slavish sentiments at a time when blacks are on the march toward liberation. But Ellie explains the facts of life to him: how she feeds and dresses her relatives and furnishes their homes at the Harrison's expense

"I know the pay is bad," she declares, "but I'd be losing money on any other job." But when things look grimmest, the telephone rings with the message that the Harrisons have made up and need their maid at once as a sitter

Winner of the coveted Vernon Rice and Obie Awards. A long-run Off-Broadway hit, produced with an all-black cast and given in tandem with A Day of Absence

Filled with sharp, satiric thrusts, the play reports hilariously on the plight of two black domestics whose white employers are on the verge of divorce thereby threatening a cutoff in the household graft which has brought considerable luxury to their lives

"His satire is sharp without being angry, and he can laugh at Negroes as well as at whites" ~ NY World-Telegram & Sun

"Laughter is a powerful weapon, and it is good to see it being put to work in the Negro theater" ~ NY Herald Tribune

A Day of Absence ~ A satire about an imaginary Southern town where all the black people have suddenly disappeared. The only ones left are sick and lying in hospital beds, refusing to get well

Infants are crying because they are being tended to by strange parents. The Mayor pleads for the President, Governor, and the NAACP to send him "a jackpot of jigaboos"

On a nationwide radio network he calls on the blacks, wherever they are, to come back. He shows them the cloths with which they wash cars and the brushes with which they shine shoes as sentimental reminders of the goodies that await them

In the end the blacks begin to reappear, as mysteriously as they had vanished, and the white community, sobered by what has transpired, breathes a sigh of relief at the return of the rather uneasy status quo

What will happen next is left unsaid, but the suggestion is strong that things will never quite be the same again

Winner of the coveted Vernon Rice and Obie Awards

Coupled with Happy Ending in its successful Off-Broadway production, this clever and enormously amusing satire is described by the author as "A Reverse Minstrel Show

"Here the all-black cast, made up in white face, recount the uproarious emergencies which occur when a Southern town is faced with the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all its black citizens

"Laughter can be as effective as anger in telling white America what the Negro has on his mind" ~ NY Times

" a gust of fresh air among racial plays" ~ Life Magazine