Jamal Williams

Miss Ann Pandora's Box Jamal Williams

This play is an examination of how colorism within one's own race can destroy loved ones and a family's bloodline. An elderly woman returns to the ancestral home that now belongs to her daughter and the son-in-law that she hates because she is mourning the sudden death of her only son. Drunken and depressed she finds herself in the boarded up nursery where she had given birth to her two children fifty years before. In her despair, anger, and subconscious guilt the crying of baby constantly permeates from behind a wall and beckons to her in a Edgar Allen Poe type way to remind her of a horrible crime she'd committed in this very room so many years before to hide the results of her lustful hypocrisies. She has buried of a child in the wall. Just the fact that she is in this house is causing great distress between her childless daughter and her lawyer husband. Try as they can, they cannot make her leave this ancient nursery. The wife convinces her husband that this situation is temporary and that because she is all her mother has left, she has to at least hire a nurse to attend to her mother so that she doesn't do harm to herself. But just her presence in the house is a cancer that will ultimately bring upon a moment-of-truth and will dig up and expose old scabs between the couple. The live-in nurse that they bring in is someone who has a fifty-year grudge to exact from the grieving woman. Ghost of the past and present visit upon this woman to make her come to terms on how this whole tragedy has been brought upon herself and her beliefs of "skin" superiority that borders on the insane. It is a story about how racism within the race has caused the destruction of the bloodlines of a black aristocratic family. As she mourns and cusses, and scorns and drinks and smokes, ghost of the past and some of the present converge on her to finish the job.