Playwright Marcus Gardley’s ambitious The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with a community of self-proclaimed Freemen, Black Seminoles and mixed-race people living in an all-black town in nineteenth-century Oklahoma. (“It has Brown written all over it,” enthused the Brown Daily Herald.) At nearly three hours long, the play covers a lot of emotional terrain. Based on the real migration of the Black Seminoles from Florida, the creation myth looks at the intersection of cultures and beliefs when a town’s well runs dry.
