Poetry

...The group here are four men (representing the 400-odd study participants) who are held together not by their work (farming) but by their band, which they name Miss Evers's Boys, and their desire to dance and play their way out of the hardscrabble world in which they live...

...The play is set in 1932, when both Nurse Evers and her patients believe the men are or are about to be treated for "bad blood," and 1946, when an attempt is made to keep the men from the penicillin which has now become available at antivenereal clinics...

...and the doctors are accused by the crippled Willie...

...The moral center of the play is Miss Evers, the dedicated nurse, the friend of the men she looked after, who finally recognized what she was part of but, after the death of a man to whom she belatedly gave penicillin, "just fell in line...

...751...

...GERALD WEALES p--------_______ l m l l i m ~ I C O M M O N W E A L i I I i 15 Dutch Street, New York, N.Y...

...These scenes are intercut with direct statements from Miss Evers's testimony at the 1972 Senate hearing on the project, and an Epilogue in which Miss Evers ("What kind of friend could do what you did...

...12/20/91 I I I I ! 20 December 1991...

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...Although Feldshuh's focus is on the individuals involved, the play inevitably chronicles a horror story, an American shame perpetrated while we were all being properly outraged at Nazi science...

...The two doctors--the black scientist from Tuskegee and the white one from Washington--might be villains in a doctrinaire play, but here it is never clear how selfdeluding they are in their quests for racial equality and scientific knowledge...