There are plays that provocatively reenact an historical event. There are others that make the viewer angry at an ongoing injustice. A play that does both is David Feldshuh's "Miss Evers' Boys." A Pulitzer Prize finalist given its world premiere in Baltimore in 1989, it has already reached the screen as an acclaimed 1997 HBO film, but somehow is only now having its New York stage premiere.
"Miss Evers' Boys" is a fictional dramatization of the Tuskegee Study in Macon, Ala., which began in 1932. When the money for a treatment program for non-contagious syphilis ran out, the program was transformed into "A Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," in which 399 patients were treated as a control group. The study went on to "end point," the deaths of the participants, even after penicillin was invented.
The study's nurse (Miss Evers) narrates the play in flashback with her testimony at a congressional hearing in 1972. As played by Adriane Lenox, she is a woman fighting her own demons who must deal with the morality of being lied to, then being asked to lie to her patients. J. Paul Boehmer and Terry Alexander as the research doctors, one Caucasian, one African-American, respectively, show us how racism was used in the name of science.
Feldshuh makes this fascinating for the viewer by creating four patients whom we follow from 1932 until the study was stopped in 1972. Under the astute direction of Kent Gash, the lives of these mostly illiterate farmers are laid bare: Daryl Edwards as Hodman, a man who believes in folk medicine; Byron Easley as Willie, who aspires to become a dancer at the Cotton Club; Chad L. Coleman as Caleb, who eventually uses his verbal dexterity to become a minister; and Helmar Augustus Cooper as Ben, the widower who desires to learn how to write his name. "Miss Evers' Boys" is powerful theatre for those who want more than entertainment.