Stick Fly (2011)
Production still from Stick Fly, 2011Lydia Diamond (Playwright)
8 December, 2011 – 26 February, 2012
Stick Fly features the LeVays, an affluent African American family with multiple houses, including a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard, where most of the play’s action occurs. Like A Raisin in the Sun, Stick Fly relies on an ensemble cast to explore multiple facets of African American identity. Stick Fly tells the story of Taylor, an entomologist whose research inspires the play’s title. Taylor visits the LeVay home for the first time with her fiancé and fledgling fiction writer Kent. Although she is the daughter of a wealthy public intellectual, James Bradley Scott, her father divorced her mother and withdrew from Taylor’s life, leaving them to struggle financially. During her time at the LeVay home, Taylor must balance her resentments as an outsider in the lives of the wealthy with her desire to successfully integrate into the LeVay family. She also struggles with what she perceives as the infiltration of the white world into the safe space of the LeVay home as represented through Kimber, the white girlfriend of Kent’s brother Flip. Parallel to Taylor’s explorations of identity is the narrative of Cheryl. Due to illness, Cheryl works in her mother’s role and, like Taylor, must negotiate her dual class identifications. Although she is the daughter of the maid, her connections with the LeVay family have enabled her education at an exclusive private school in the suburbs of New York City. Cheryl’s sense of class identity becomes even more complicated when she learns that she is the product of an affair between her mother and the Le-Vay family patriarch, Dr. LeVay. (Source: Project MUSE)
