Coming off the heels of a successful Broadway run in 2023 that saw the 65-year-old satire revived, Purlie Victorious arrived at Studio Theatre with fervor. Born into a sharecropping family sometime during the early 1900’s, traveling preacher Purlie Victorious Judson returns to his Southern r oots planning to buy back his ancestral church from the brutal segregationist who rules his namesake county with an iron fist, the self-proclaimed embodiment of Southern “gentility,” Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee. Purlie descends upon Cotchipee County with freedom on his mind, though what he envisions freedom to be shifts as time passes. When Davis began to pen the play, he sought to write a scathing, somber piece of protest theatre. As he sat with these characters, the play took a different shape — one that would use humor as a tool to communicate the absurdity of bigotry, with re-purposed minstrel tropes and stereotypes of well-to-do white Southerners. Elliott Bales, Stephen Patrick Martin, Jacob Thompson, Warner Miller, and Kelli Blackwell. The piece, especially in director Psalmayene 24’s vision, also plays with time and history in ways that emphasize both its timeliness and timelessness. Though the play is meant to take place in Georgia in the 1950’s, the costumes suggest a late-19th century setting, and the trappings of vaudeville introduced by the set allude to the early 20th century. Characters allude to events like the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, while also speaking of the Confederacy like a recent memory. Purlie himself espouses radical ideas of freedom and beauty against a humble (yet intricate) backdrop that harkens back to an earlier time. All of these points of temporal contrast, combined with the setting given by Davis in the play — “the recent past” — serve to remind us that none of these events, from the Civil War to Jim Crow to the racial inequities of today, are part of some long-forgotten bygone age. But there is a current of hope that runs throughout the play. A hope that love and sensibility can somehow prevail and we can all discover what freedom can mean for the collective good. Purlie Victorious is now running at Studio Theatre through June 21, 2026. Tickets are available at studiotheatre.org. The post Ossie Davis’s PURLIE VICTORIOUS Shapes Time and Space to Deliver a Timely Message first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less