By Michael Strangeways
Summer 2017 has a fork in it now ’cause it’s DONE and it’s September which means the kidsare back in school and the stores are full of Halloween candy and local theaters are debuting 25 new productions or so this month including the return of the very interesting team at The Williams Project with a reprise of a play they’ve produced in the past: James Baldwin’s 1964 play BLUES FOR MISTER CHARLIE. Based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14 year old black youth visiting family in Mississippi who was brutally lynched for allegedly speaking offensively to a white woman in a grocery store. The Till murder was one of the sparks leading to the Civil Rights Movement and Baldwin, best known as a novelist and essayist uses the basic framework of the actual event for this play.