African-American experience 1945

Growing up in Canada in the 1950’s, I had very little experience with African-Americans and thus had a shocking exposure when I went on a spontaneous drive to Florida around age 13 with my uncle and some older cousins. We drove uneventfully from Montreal as far as Washington and then entered the south. My jaw dropped when I saw rest rooms and water fountains labeled “whites only” and “colored only.” I was thus looking forward to the Lyric Stage’s production of “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,” which centered around a fictional black beauty parlor in Memphis in 1945, a time not that different from the 1950’s. While there were some stirring moments, such as the comment by the black postman, saved from military duty by his polio-afflicted leg, “why fight for freedom over there when we need to do it here?” Another dramatic highlight was the story told by a customer whose husband went in uniform with his family to get supplies only to be sneeringly told: “you might have been a soldier there, but here you are just a nigger.” Unfortunately, these dramatic moments were drowned by the mundane day to day chatter among the boarders/assistants at Miss Mary’s shop. The dialog was tedious, and the accents, perhaps authentic, made the story hard to follow, though easier with repetition. It was hard to really care about the characters. More could have been done with this raw material.