Bianca Laverne Jones, Kerry Warren, Eunice Woods, Alicia Pilgrim, and Margaret Odette Photo by Hollis King

In the decades following the American Civil War, when employment for Black men in the South was scarce, an abundance of Black families were financially supported by the meager wages earned by women as laundresses.

At the Atlanta laundry co-op that supplies the play's main setting, the process involves picking up dirty clothes from customers' homes, lugging heavy containers of water to be boiled, making lye soap, stirring the boiled clothing and linens with paddles, scrubbing them with washboards, wringing them out and hanging them to dry before pressing, folding and delivering back–usually picking up the next day's work right then.

And while they may be proud to offer their services to Black doctors and speechmakers, their customers are primarily white families who have acquired the means to pay for the arduous, time-consuming but necessary task, but who lack the respect to pay these businesswomen in a timely manner.

Smith's inspiration for the play was a trip to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, where she learned of a mostly forgotten, but nevertheless landmark, episode in American history, Atlanta's Washerwomen Strike of 1881.

Regarded as the first successful interracial, organized labor strike of the post-Civil War era, this demand for $1 compensation per dozen pounds of laundry, timed to coincide with the International Cotton Exposition, began as a small grass-roots movement among Black women that grew to over 3,000 members in weeks, including white women, who made up only two percent of Atlanta's laundresses.

Before director Awoye Timpo's production for Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theatre at the 99-seat WP Theater begins, we see two onstage panels supplied by set designer Jason Ardizzone-West which display designer Abhita Austin's animated projections that resemble an abstract view of linens waving in the breeze.

The soft, calming feel they provide is dissipated once the drama commences with a very effective, wordless montage choreographed by Adesola Osakalumi and Jill M. Vallery, which spotlights each of the five main fictional characters as they go through the grind of their everyday work. As they put their bodies through familiar paces, we hear the rhythmic soundscape of cloth grinding against washboards, voices grunting as they handle heavy objects, and the deep breathing that accompanies trying to stay mobile in the forceful Atlanta heat.

As each woman is featured, projections identify them individually in displays that suggest storybook pages, or perhaps a museum display. There's Anna (Eunice Woods), the business-minded leader who is kept up nights worrying about how much longer she can extend credit to white customers who don't seem anxious to pay, and Jeanie (Bianca LaVerne Jones), the upbeat nurturer. They're the elders of the group and one might assume they performed these chores as enslaved women for most of the first half of their lives. Their younger colleagues include Thomasine (Margaret Odette), a mother of four in an abusive marriage, the optimistic newlywed Charity (Alicia Pilgrim), and ambitious student Jewel (Kerry Warren).

At the conclusion of their labors, the actors turn the wheeled panels around, and we're in the realistically detailed living and working space of what the playwright describes as "a double barrel shotgun house, in Atlanta's Fourth Ward." It's a simple bit of theatrics, but it effectively emphasizes history's reality that inspires the playwright's storytelling.

"The city tryna to push Negroes who own property out the Fourth Ward," concludes Anna when her property taxes are raised. "Talkin' 'bout some Cotton Expo gonna bring more railroad tracks, factories, and thangs. I can't keep up with the taxes. Got a letter that say if I don't have 'em paid soon, I'll lose this place."

In Smith's fiction, this is the personal matter that sets the idea to organize a city-wide strike of washerwomen in motion. At first it's a movement exclusively among Black women, as information is passed on through whispers. But when newspaper headlines begin villainizing these workers and small business owners, unexpected support comes from a white laundress named Mozelle (Rebecca Haden), who says she can recruit many more white laundresses who are suffering the same kind of mistreatment. Although you can sense the initial mistrust of Mozelle, history tells us that the leadership of Black women in this movement wasn't compromised.

An interesting aspect of the production is that, despite their difficult manual labor in abusive heat, costume designer Gail Cooper-Hecht has the women always dressed neatly and attractively in long shirts, high collars, and full-length sleeves, emphasizing the importance of a clean appearance when trying to gain public favor.

Though the play delves a bit into the personal lives of each character, they're drawn out more as representations of different types, with the actual events of the strike providing the main narrative.

While I found the play most enjoyable for its educational aspects, and to admire the commitment of the fine acting ensemble, this was one of those situations where this white male theatregoer noticed very few people who looked like him in the audience, and much of the evening's excitement was supplied by hearing the loud responses of the abundance of Black women in the theater and feeling the connections they were making with both the actors and the characters they portrayed. A reminder that attending theatre created by other cultures is one of the best paths to bonding and understanding.