I am almost finished reading the novel "Strange Fruit" by Lillian Smith, the source text for Long Leaf's world premier this June. I am not 100% sure how I feel about the book. It is powerful, no doubt, and it is disturbing. Overall it is an excellent text. With that said... The text, until the events leading up to the death of one of the characters, jumps about in time. This is very disconcerting, as you have to think while you are reading "Is it now, the 1930s or is it when the characters were younger?" This happens from one paragraph to the next in a chapter sometimes. The action in our production is linear. Thank goodness for that, because that would be a joy to try and stage! The librettists have telescoped the characters: gone is 2/3rds of the town, gone is Tracy's sister Laura, gone are Dorothy's parents, gone is an unplanned pregnancy for a teenage white girl. In the book that is an exceptionally powerful scene, as the Father of the girl in question pleads and bargains with Dr Deen, Tracy's father. Gone, by the way, is Tracy's father. Tutwiler Deen does not play an overly large role in the novel, so he will not be missed too terribly. There is a subplot about Tracy's sister Laura having artistic leanings (read for that perhaps slightly Sapphic leanings). Lillian Smith paints a well-detailed picture of life in Georgia before the Second World War. The book was "banned in Boston," and bookstores in Atlanta would not carry it (yet they did carry "Gone with the Wind" which took me an entire summer to read). I have been looking for the reviews from when the book was first published. I have located the "New York Times" and "Time" reviews and will scout through the "Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature" during my lunch this week. The joys of working in a library.

More on my thoughts about the book later.
David