Announcing the Cast for Flyin' West

City Park Players is pleased to announce the third production of our 2009 season; a drama entitled Flyin’ West by Pearl Cleage as directed by Diane Falcone, which will be presented at the Hearn Stage in Downtown Alexandria August 6 -16.

Flyin' West is a powerful play about a family of sisters who abandon the oppressive racism of the post-Reconstruction South to take advantage of the Homestead Act and own their own land in Nicodemus, Kansas (www.nicodemuskansas.com). Facing problems ranging from the inevitability of long, cold winters, to the possibility of domestic violence, to the continuing spectra of racial conflict, the women of Flyin' West include Rosa Metoyer as Miss Leah, the old woman whose memories of slavery and its aftermath comprise a living oral history; Karen Riley Simmons as Sophie Washington, whose determination to protect her land and those she loves puts to rest forever the requirement that western archetypes be white and male; Natalie C.F. Phillips as Fannie Mae Dove, the gentle sister, trying to civilize the frontier with fine china and roses, who finds herself falling in love with their soft-spoken neighbor, Doogie Golatt as Wil Parish; and Margrek Dorsey as Minnie Dove Charles, the headstrong baby sister whose mulatto husband, Frank, portrayed by Jerry Havens, introduces a danger into the household that tests their sisterhood in unexpected ways.