Orphaned at age four, she was sent from Baltimore to segregated Durham, North Carolina, to live with her unflappable Aunt Pauline, who, while strict, was liberal-minded in accepting the tomboy Pauli as “my little boy-girl.” In fact, throughout her life, Murray would struggle with feelings of sexual “in-betweenness”-she tried unsuccessfully to get her doctors to give her testosterone-that today we would recognize as a transgendered identity. In a voice that is energetic, wry, and direct, Murray tells of a childhood dramatically altered by the sudden loss of her spirited, hard-working parents.

At last, with the republication of this “beautifully crafted” memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century. Yet Murray’s name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years now they are once again entering the public discourse. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. (A repeated motif where the ensemble sits impassive on chairs fringing the stage, for instance, recalls those poor souls who, attracting neither praise nor blame in life, the poet found too wretched for hell.First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. I'll go on.' – though there are clear shades of Dante's visions of the damned. Indeed, the work seems more attuned to existentialism than medieval religious epic – I kept thinking of the last page from Beckett's The Unnamable: 'You must go on. Tightly choreographed physical theatre swells and dissolves between isolation and synchronised movement, between torment and fleeting joy, with an almost Sisyphean power. Two figures trade places in a cruel dance: the first prone, desperate for assistance, is helped up, then crushes her benefactor's head under bootheels.

A woman stands before (perhaps snatching at, perhaps sifting through) a stream of sand falling from the heavens. On a set lightly suggesting a ruined church hall, floodlights of shocking wattage flash upon frozen moments and disjointed, but painterly, scenes.Ī man sweeps rubble into a corner and, with alarming violence, throws his broom away. Richard Vabre's intensely dramatic lighting and Jethro Woodward's composition and sound staging are essential players in the work.

Song in a weary throat