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A SUDDEN SPONTANEOUS EVENT. By David Lee Nelson. Directed by Sharon Graci. PURE Theatre, Charleston, South Carolina. March 26, 2016.
Charleston, South Carolina, has had a year that defies adequate description. Two months after the police shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston, the massacre at the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church traumatized the city in ways that the community is still processing. Despite other disasters and significant changes that occurred last year- the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds, the Thousand Year Flood, the election of a new mayor-narratives of forgiveness and reconciliation, led by the parishioners of Emanuel A.M.E., have emerged as mainstays of Charleston's cultural conversation. David Lee Nelson's new play, A Sudden Spontaneous Event, is not a direct response to Charleston's current events, but the playwright tapped into the city's communal process of loss, forgiveness, and peace as he developed the work for its world premiere at Charleston's PURE Theatre. Spontaneous is not explicitly about the racial tensions that Charleston shares with the rest of the nation, but the domestic situation presented in PURE's production can be read as metaphorically representative of the country's struggle to come to terms with its racial history.
The white-washed set, designed by Richard Heffner, provided a visual double entendre against which the play's action was set. The sparse environment, where even the props and furniture were painted white, provided a blank slate upon which audience members could project...