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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1973, Alice Walker made a pilgrimage to Eatonville, Florida, to place a tombstone on the unmarked grave of the African-American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Walker's 1982 novel, "The Color Purple," has now been made into a musical (at the Broadway), and its abused, humiliated, and stifled heroine, Celie (the compelling LaChanze), embodies one of Hurston's trenchant observations: "People can be slave-ships in shoes." The opening image of the musical is perhaps its most resonant. Celie and her sister, Nettie, as children, sit in an ancient tree clapping their hands and chanting doggerel:
Papa don't like no screamin' round here, No lip from da woman when they chug dat beer.
Silence is at issue in the girls' game and in their lives. In a heartbeat, Celie has lost her song. She is now fourteen, and her stepfather has just impregnated her for the second time. Both children are taken from her. By then, she has also lost her mother, her father, and is about to lose her sister; and when she's married off to the cruel Mister (Kingsley Leggs) for the price of a cow, for all intents and purposes she has lost her life. For most of the show, the homely Celie is a domestic drudge. Her husband calls...
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