His laziness overwhelms him despite the nagging by his wife Ada (Carmen Roman). Rather Jeeter spends his time either ‘thinking’ or scheming to get food and money. Not having planted or harvested a crop in seven years, amazingly Jeeter Lester (Dennis Cockrum) has no sense of urgency despite his acute hunger. They are faced with starvation and eviction from the land they have farmed for generations. The Lester’s give new depth to dysfunctional and desperate families. The Lester clan is a morally corrupt group of poverty stricken sharecroppers that find themselves without money, food or hope. James Leaming’s set is a dilapidated shack in rural Georgia near the South Carolina border during the Great Depression. It took lawsuits to reopen the show.Īmerican Blues Theater, under the tight direction by Cecilie Keenan, have resurrected all the gritty raw realism of Kirkland’s Tobacco Road. When Tobacco Road toured the nation, it was declared ‘obscene’ and barred in Chicago and Detroit among other cities. Tobacco Road played to 3,183 performances making it the second longest running drama in Broadway history. Opening in 1933, Jack Kirkland’s Tobacco Road gave the Broadway audience a realistic look at the plight of rural sharecroppers who live in economic and moral poverty fueled by ignorance, incest and laziness. Gritty realism aptly depicts the underbelly of rural Southern sharecroppers By Jack Kirkland based on the novel by Erskine CaldwellĪt Victory Gardens’ Richard Christensen Theatre

Tobacco road novel