Mark Stein,Harley White Jr.
The nine Scottsboro Boys arrive from eternity to the stage of the theater producing the play. They have come to keep alive the story of their arrest and conviction for the rape of two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931 (despite incontrovertible medical evidence to the contrary). Putting on their own vaudeville show, the Scottsboro Boys use songs, a magic act, a ventriloquist act, skits and soft shoe to convey the tawdry show that their case became, as the Communist Party and the NAACP competed for control of their defense, while the state of Alabama postured to justify its imposition of the death sentence despite the evidence and two Supreme Court rulings requiring new trials. Behind the masks, the question remains-and between the vaudeville scenes the play examines-who were these nine young men?
Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys: An Evening of Vaudeville and Sorrow