Timely Plays that Ring True and Linger

Wray attended a lecture given by Howard University professor, Dr. Nikki M. Taylor, on her book, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge. - that reviewers are calling, "a savagely brilliant look at oppressed women forced to seize justice for themselves." 

Peggy Kurkowski. reviewer. 

Wray was impressed with this groundbreaking study that revealed a buried truth about ensalved women. Wray and Taylor talked after the lecture and it was decided that Wray would work with her fellows and create a dramatization of this truth and its relevance to today.

THE BLOOD CRIES OUT

Wray has done much reading and her own experimenting to figure how best to show painful and dark history on the stage. Responses to her work reveal she knows how to. She uses magical realism and makes the story revelant and universal. She's been working on this piece for a couple of years; consulting others, reading what others have written and - she listens to the whisperer in her ear. She's now found the revelant backstory, the characters, and a way to bring the stories of the women in Brooding into light in a way she hopes audiences will cheer. Early on Wray chose the working title for this project, The Blood Cries Out, because those were the words Dr. Taylor used during the lecture when she was asked why she wrote about these women. Wray told Tayor, "I too heard that cry - I heard it long ago from the blood that soaked the red clay in Southampton during a Slave Rebellion and its aftermath." The image above represents two elements that are in this piece. Stay tuned, it will be ready for 2026.

It's interesting the things that can trigger artists "to have to do something" "create something!" A long ago article written about a street in the Fan in Richmond; a chance meeting with a part-time Fan resident who just wrote a play about the "one drop rule"; and the discovery that some artists living in the Fan over 100 years ago were the subjects of that article and were also instrumental in getting the horrendous Racial Integrity Act passed into law (which led to the one drop rule) in Va in March of 2024 - - well those were triggers for a well known artist in the Fan to contact Wray about doing something - exposing what some Plum Street artists did years ago. Well, some hesitation shifted the project, and it is now, VIRGINIA AT A CROSSROADS: AGAIN

Read on  ->

Wray realized the hesitency was coming from Fan residents; also the monument removals had stirred things up in the city. Wray had done extensive research on the bad actors around this law, and a second law that allowed forced sterilizations, both were passed by Virginia on the same day. Wray realized that some bad actors didn't live in the Fan and more attention needed to be put on them. Wray was living part-time in the Fan then. She now lives full-time in Augusta County, just over Afton from Charlottesville and UVA, just a few miles from Indian Mound Rd. The story that needs to be told about that those laws and the bad actors and the harm they caused - are right in her backyard: Walter Ashby Plecker, born in Augusta  County  - he pushed for the laws and used one to cause harm; he erased Native American Tribes in Va - especially the Monacan's whose burial mound is a few miles from Wray's home; then there's UVA - ground zero for Eugenics; and Joseph Dejarnette, MD at Western State Hospital where forced sterilizations were carried out in Stauton until 1070. Wray now has her own triggers and local partners like Earl Hamner Theatre and others who are ready to do the work. Stay tuned, the relevancy to our world today is shocking and triggering.