Happy Ending and Day of Absence - two plays

THE STORIES: HAPPY ENDING. The story of two sisters, Ellie and Vi, who work as maid and laundress for the wealthy Harrisons. As the play begins they are sitting at the kitchen table in a tenement apartment in Harlem, lamenting the end of their good times. Mr. Harrison has discovered his wife in an act of infidelity. The sisters fear that if the marriage breaks up they will be both out of a job. Their nephew, Junie, chides them for their slavish sentiments at a time when blacks are on the march toward liberation. But Ellie explains the facts of life to him: how she feeds and dresses her relatives and furnishes their homes at the Harrison's expense. I know the pay is bad, she declares, but I'd be losing money on any other job. But when things look grimmest, the telephone rings with the message that the Harrisons have made up and need their maid at once as a sitter. (2 men, 2 women.) A DAY OF ABSENCE. A satire about an imaginary Southern town where all the black people have suddenly disappeared. The only ones left are sick and lying in hospital beds, refusing to get well. Infants are crying because they are being tended to by strange parents. The Mayor pleads for the President, Governor, and the NAACP to send him a jackpot of jigaboos. On a nationwide radio network he calls on the blacks, wherever they are, to come back. He shows them the cloths with which they wash cars and the brushes with which they shine shoes as sentimental reminders of the goodies that await them. In the end the blacks begin to reappear, as mysteriously as they had vanished, and the white community, sobered by what has transpired, breathes a sigh of relief at the return of the rather uneasy status quo. What will happen next is left unsaid, but the suggestion is strong that things will never quite be the same again. (8 men, 6 women, many roles doubled.)Douglas Turner Ward is the author of 'Happy Ending and Day of Absence - two plays' with ISBN 9780822202776 and ISBN 0822202778.