Lorna C. Hill’s favorite author is Mark Twain, so Charles Smith’s new play was a must for this season of celebration. PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, adapted from the 1894 novel by Mark Twain, is the pre-Civil War story of the two sons of Judge Driscoll, the chief citizen of Dawson’s Landing, Missouri. One of those sons - Tom - is his legal heir and the child of his wife. The other, Chambers, is his child by his house slave, Roxy. After the Judge’s wife dies, Roxy is left in charge of both infant children, who are close enough in features to be twins. When Roxy is threatened with being sold away from her son, she decides to switch the babies in their cradles. The two boys grow up with each other’s identities - creating a situation both richly ironic and ultimately tragic. As Langston Hughes has written, PUDD’NHEAD WILSON? is a tribute to Mark Twain’s understanding of human character,? and his belief that ?color is only skin deep.?
PUDD'NHEAD WILSON is the second new play to be commissioned as part of The Acting Company's ambitious five-year project The American Century. Charles Smith, an alumnus of New Dramatists, is playwright-in-residence at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. The St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre, the HBO New Writers Project, Penumbra Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Henry Street Settlement in New York have produced Mr. Smith’s plays. A graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Mr. Smith is the author of two Emmy Award winning teleplays and currently teaches at Ohio University.
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