For a number of years, actress, director, performance artist, teacher, and writer Robbie McCauley has been creating socio-political works, which draw on her family history, as in Indian Blood and the OBIE winner Sally’s Rape.  In Sugar McCauley traces her own life, beginning in childhood in a still segregated Georgia.  Life revolved around family, community, cooking, eating, and the garden which supplied the family with healthful food.  A happy and seemingly fit child, her cuts and bruises healed slowly. She was told that she must “have a little sugar,” code for diabetes.

McCauley tells us: “Sugar is complicated” – and it is in this play.  It connects to love, pleasure, illness, pain, suffering, overcoming, and slavery.  She wrote Sugar to rid herself of the shame she felt about the stigma of diabetes and to bring attention to the growing problem of the disease in the African American community.

…

Read More Read More