This show was produced from October 22 – November 7, 2010

The Old Settler

By John Henry Redwood

Directed By Theresa Devine Banford & Brad Reiter

STARRING

Dawn S. Christopher • Connie Norwood • Alexandra Mays Ford • Kim E. Brown

“The title comes from the lyrics of Irving Berlin’s song, Sisters, written for the comic movie, White Christmas. While THE OLD SETTLER is not a comedy, the concept of sisters and the vagaries of their living together is key to understanding what unfolds on the stage.”

In World War II Harlem, New York, a fifty-five-year-old spinster (or as they were called in those days—an Old Settler), Elizabeth Borny, takes in a young male roomer, Husband Witherspoon, to help her with the rent. Husband has come to Harlem from South Carolina to search for his girlfriend, Lou Bessie Preston. Also living with Elizabeth is her sister, Quilly McGrath, fifty-three. There is an ominous cloud of tension that hangs over Elizabeth and Quilly’s relationship. This tension is further exacerbated when Elizabeth and Husband take to liking each other. Quilly, who doesn’t like Husband living with them in the first place, surely doesn’t approve of their “carrying on,” especially since Elizabeth is old enough to be Husband’s mother. It is this “carrying on” that exposes a thirty-year-old wound which, until now, only had a bandage—now the wound can heal for the sisters.

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Funding has been made possible in part by the Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission at Camden County College, through the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.