History comes clean in ‘The Wash’ at The Studio@620

In 1881, America was just coming out of the Reconstruction period. The Civil War had ended less than 20 years before, and its awful stench still hung in the air.

For former slaves, their families and their descendants, it would an uphill climb. For them, all aspects of life were new. There was nothing to reconstruct.

In Georgia, a grassroots labor movement began among the Black women working as city laundresses. The Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike came to involve around 3,000 women, demanding both respect and fair wages for their backbreaking, 18-hour work days.

It was a pivotal moment in American history, and a moment immortalized by playwright Kelundra Smith in her historical drama The Wash.

“I love the fact that this story reminds us that ordinary people can do extraordinary things,” says The Studio@620 artistic director Erica Sutherlin, whose production of The Wash opens Thursday and will run through Oct. 11. “When we are tired, fed up, frustrated, over it.”

It was the era of uber-restrictive “black codes” and Jim Crow laws. “There’s a boom that happens – we’ll put ‘boom’ in quotations – that happens after the Civil War, with Blacks being able to hold office and things like that,” Sutherlin explains. “But at the same time, we’re not far from slavery.

“And that’s what I want people to remember. These women were slaves; they all were born into slavery, or right at the end of it. And they found their freedom.”

Oppression and racism night have been more subtle by the 1880s, but things hadn’t changed all that very much. “To have that desire and that gumption to want more … most of these women in our story, their husbands have died. And it’s another thing to not have a man there with you.

“It’s so powerful to see these women come together collectively, across the board, to do something that is very dangerous.”

An uprising by Black women would surely have been quashed quickly by the white powers-that-be.

Wouldn’t it?

“Kelundra really wanted to show that these ideas, these moments, these movements are, and can be, bigger than race,” says Sutherlin. “When you had white women, and Native American women, joining this strike. Because they saw something that was greater than the color of our each individual skin. That’s powerful.”

Raved the New York Stage Review: “The actual struggle that galvanizes and unites these women generates a dramatic impetus that keeps The Wash chugging along.”

Sutherlin insists The Wash, which is being produced in collaboration with Powerstories Theatre, is much more than a textbook, eat-your-vegetables lesson in history.

“Kalundra did something very smart. She wrote real people. And sometimes the way we deal with history: It’s past, it has this stiffness about it, we forget that people are human.

“But these women are lively. It’s funny. They are friends. They fight with each other. They laugh with each other, they cry with each other. They take risks together. I love that about this piece.”

Sutherlin, meanwhile, spent August and early September, directing her second movie for Lifetime Television. The drama One Last Shot, starring Tisha Campbell, is scheduled to air on the network Nov. 14.

Opening night of The Wash (Thursday, Oct. 1) is sold out. For all showtimes and tickets, click on this link.

The Studio@620 is at 620 1st Avenue S. in St. Petersburg.