Southern Girls - Dura Temple and Sheri Bailey 
Directed by Kindra Steenerson

Opening night featured guest, Sheri Bailey.

                                      

Mainstage Theatre, Cultural Arts Building
October 18-20, 2007 - 8:00 p.m. curtain.
October 21, 2007 - 2:00 p.m. matinee

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Sheri Bailey moved to California to attend UCLA's graduate playwriting program. Her Summers in Suffolk was workshopped at the 1990 Mark Taper Forum's New Works Festival, and she received a 1993 Individual Theatre Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her other plays include All Kinds of Blue, Dannie 'n Laurence, Murder and Mayhem at the Red River Bar and Walking With a Panther. Her screen adaptation of the award-winning All Kinds of Blue has been optioned by Jasmine Guy's Black 'n White Productions, and the romantic comedy Dannie 'n Laurence was optioned by Halle Berry. Summers in Suffolk had its world premiere in Los Angeles in June 1996. Her newest play, a commissioned adaptation of Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novella, Passing, premiered at the Towne Street Theatre, Los Angeles, in September 1996. Southern Girls, which Sheri wrote along with playwright, Dura Temple, was developed and produced in 1991 at University of Alabama, and became an ACTF national alternate selection. Bailey lives in Norfolk, Va., with her daughter, Peyton, and their dog, Max.

Synopsis

Southern Girls is a memory play by Sheri Bailey and Dura Temple. It follows the lives of six little girls, three white, two black, and one bi-racial, who play together in a small Alabama town. Utilizing flashback and epistle, the action chronicles their often-complicated relationships to one another, their racial identities, and their rapidly changing world from 1956 through middle age. 

Wanda-Sue, half-black and half-white, teeters between the world of her white half-sister, Charlotte, her white friends, Dolly and June-Adele, and her black friends, sisters Ruth and Naomi. Each woman is driven by unique fears, hopes and secrets. As the years pass by and their world changes, each woman's dreams are affected by the turbulent times in which they live.

(From Dramatic Publishing)

For Southern Girls previews see http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/article/20071018/NEWS/710180306/1013/ae06
http://appserv02.uncw.edu/news/article.asp?ID=2219