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Now in Proposals I’m writing about a black couple in 1954 just prior to the Civil Rights,
and these are by no means Uncle Tom kind of people. The woman especially is very enlightened,
because she is very assured of herself because she learned it from her mother. And the mother
was very respectful to the people she worked for, but she knew her own position too. So
in a sense, both the mother, which you don’t see in the play, and this woman – the black
woman who is now about 44 years old – feels that she runs the family, that they don’t
run it, she does. Not with malice or anything else, with great love, but she has a much
more objective viewpoint than they do. But I wrote it in – I mean August Wilson may
find fault with it – but I wrote it in what I remember the dialogue being from the ones
that I knew and came in contact with in those days. And people who have come up to me reading
the play and said, “How did you know these people so well?” And I said, “I don’t
know.” There’s that osmosis thing again. And the woman who was playing it, Scotty Caldwell,
a wonderful black actress who won the Tony Award I think in Joe Turner the August Wilson
play, she read the play…first she heard that it was a domestic, and she said, “I
don’t want to play a domestic,” so they said, “Well read the play.” And then she
read it, and she says, “Oh, this isn’t really a domestic. This a woman who has a
self sense of herself.” So she came to me. She did the audition, and she was great. And
as she was leaving, she says, “You could have gone wrong there, but you didn’t.”
And it was like the best compliment I ever got. So I think she’s maybe the most important
character in the play.