Milk of Paradise
Milk of Paradise—set over two days in June 1937—follows two children adrift in a confusing world of distracted adults and too much poetry. Produced by the Women’s Project & Productions, it was performed under the artistic direction of Julia Miles at the American Place Theatre in New York City in 1980.
Milk of Paradise…deals with a well-to-do family in the ‘upper South’ in the summer of 1917. Everyone in the house on the hill in a small country town—the black servants, the white nurse and gardener, the father, mother, their 16-year-old son, 14-year-old daughter and the father’s sister, Aunt Jane—has one thing in common: a yearning to leave the confines of the hill.…
“The picture is not new or in any way startling but there is an honest sensibility, an ear for true speech and a delicacy of sentiment that are refreshing amid the noisiness of canned dramatics typical among so many of our city-bound and state-wise play makers. The atmosphere is not that of the confined theatrical hothouse but that of life lived by ordinary people, removed from the turbulence that provides most of the material for our usual theater. Modest and unempathic, the beat of simple human aspiration and the pulses of hope still throb in this seemingly placid environment—impulses which not so long ago lay under the surface in the length and breadth of our land.
“The play has been affectionately directed by Joan Vail Thorne and it is touchingly played by the entire cast, particularly so by Patricia Roe as Aunt Jane, who suffers from the physical and moral narrowness of the good old days.”
Reviewed by Harold Clurman in The Nation, April 5, 1980
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