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“Eady fuses headlines and history with language that is a field holler, a blues shout, a hip hop rap that combusts inside the soul and keep on burning.” —Bebe Moore Campbell
This spare and haunting play takes its inspiration from the case of Susan Smith, a white woman who murdered her two young children by strapping them into the back seat of her car and pushing it into a lake. In statements to the police, Smith claimed she had been carjacked by a young Black man. In Brutal Imagination, adapted from his National Book Award-finalist poetry cycle, Cornelius Eady conjures this imaginary Black man as Mr. Zero, who appears in order to “to get things done” when white people need a scapegoat for the consequences of their own actions. As Smith spins her story into more and more elaborate designs, Mr. Zero begins to rebel against his appointed task, leading Smith (and us) slowly closer to the dark secret at the center of the play.
Brutal Imagination implicates not just the small town of Union, South Carolina, but an entire American racial imaginary in which a white woman’s story, no matter how ludicrous, is always believed if it implicates a Black man.
“Resuscitating this frightening invention of racism and desperation and letting him speak for himself is the bold and inspired idea behind Brutal Imagination…It’s the sort of concept that grabs you instantly and ferociously.”
—New York Times
“In transforming Brutal Imagination from poetry to theater, Eady has grown into a powerful playwright.”
—BOMB Magazine
“Mixing facts, speculation and poetic extrapolation, Eady’s script finds Susan and Mr. Zero entwined in a dreamlike world, recounting together the events leading up to and following the murder of her children and the racial stereotypes that played into her claim and their acceptance.”
—New City Stage
“Eady’s joy in language engenders our trust in the music that his art has made of love and pain.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Over the course of the nine days between the shocking event and Susan Smith’s confession of the crime, these two characters are brought to life in a powerful, theatrical encounter.”
—TheaterMania
Cornelius Eady is a poet, playwright and musician. He is cofounder of Cave Canem and is Professor of English and Chair of Excellence in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His written work includes Kartunes, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (winner of the Lamont Prize), The Gathering of My Name, Hardheaded Weather, and Brutal Imagination (finalist for The National Book Award in Poetry). Eady's accolades include fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as a Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Award.