Emmy winner Joe Morton and Sally Murphy will reunite for a one-night-only reading of Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination after starring in the work's 2001 premiere at Vineyard Theatre. The reading will be held April 7 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, with Morton also directing. Proceeds will benefit the Innocence Project.
Based on Eady's award-winning poetry cycle of the same name, Brutal Imagination tells the true story of the 1994 incident in which Susan Smith, a white woman in South Caroline, claimed that a Black man had kidnapped her children. The FBI conducted a nationwide search for the man for nine days, until Smith confessed that she had invented him, and had in fact drowned her children herself.
鈥淲e hope this play will continue to be part of discussions in classrooms and living rooms about how we try to imagine what our multicultural future looks like,鈥� Eady said in a statement. 鈥淭hat to me is the heart of the struggle. And the arts are a vital part of this...you have to imagine it before you can walk into it. If this case had a different sheriff or different police officers...an innocent Black man could have been serving a life sentence or perhaps even been put to death.鈥�
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