About the Play:

Blues for Mr. Charlie has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

Blues for Mr. Charlie is a full-length drama by James Baldwin. A black man returns home to the South after having spent some time in the North and is brutally murdered by a white store-owner. In his award-winning play, James Baldwin turns the murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated – and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.

Blues for Mr. Charlie is a deeply humane, passionate, and poetic drama about race relations in America. Richard, a black man who is a former junkie returns to his parochial Southern town and infuriates the denizens with his incendiary talk and actions. When he is killed by a poor, illiterate, white man, the murder, the eulogy, the trial and acquittal are presented in an abstract dramatic form of time, fury, and passion. Suggested by the notorious murder trial of Emmett Till, a black youth lynched in Mississippi in 1955 – James Baldwin uses this framework to examine how everyone contributes to the creation of a society in which one man can justify killing another because of a difference in skin colour. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast. A sensation in it's New York premiere, Blues for Mr. Charlie is a searing drama by one of America's leading writers that retains all it's power to this day.

Blues for Mr. Charlie was first produced in 1964 by the Actor's Studio at the ANTA Theatre on Broadway and received a Foreign Drama Critics Award. Since then the play has been produced widely at professional theatres across the US and has been mounted by colleges and community theatres.

Cast: 7 female, 16 male

What people say:

"Written a year after Martin Luther King's ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and set in the racially segregated fictional community of Plaguetown, the play seethes at the blindness that comes with unthinking opposition, not only between Blacks and whites, but also within communities. Uncompromising in his portrayal of both sides of the racial divide, Baldwin doesn't flinch from trying to understand the white murderer, and he shows the Black community lost between turning the other cheek and violent revenge for oppression; its questions remain urgent and uncomfortable 40 years on." — The Guardian

"Fires of fury in its belly, tears of anguish in its eyes and a roar of protest in its throat. It throbs with fierce energy and passion...Brings eloquence and conviction to one of the momentous themes of our era." — The New York Times

"Explosive, eloquent, honest...." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Uncompromising in his portrayal of both sides of the racial divide, Baldwin doesn't flinch from trying to understand the white murderer, and he shows the black community lost between turning the other cheek and violent revenge for oppression; its questions remain urgent and uncomfortable 40 years on." — The Guardian (London)

About the Playwright:

James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) was an African-American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist. Eloquent and passionate on the subject of race in America, he is best known for his novels and essays. The two plays on which his reputation as a dramatist was based are The Amen Corner and Blues for Mister Charlie.