Sharon Scott Williams

Playwright Williams begins with an image whose simplicity makes its horror all the more immediate. Sharon, eight years old, hurries home after her birthday, intent on claiming the remaining piece of cake before her older brother, and discovers her mother in the throes of a psychotic episode, armed with a kitchen knife and unreachable by ordinary language. From that rupture, Williams constructs a memory play that moves between the frightened child and the woman who eventually understands what happened to her family. The writing is remarkably alert to the strange coexistence of terror and comedy in a household under siege. Southern idiom, family eccentricity, and a child’s skewed observations supply flashes of wit without ever trivializing the illness at the story’s center. Williams has an ear for the kind of language that can make a recollection feel freshly remembered rather than dutifully recited, and her prose repeatedly achieves a lyrical force without becoming self-consciously literary. [more]