Orange Light Analysis

On Monday, April 10th, I went to see the play Orange Light written by Howard Craft. The play was directed by Kathryn Hunter Williams and shown in the Kenan theatre which is within the Center for Dramatic Arts. This play is about the local tragedy of the Imperial Food Processing Plant fire that happened in Hamlet, North Carolina. I saw the closing performance of the show, and while the general message of the play did come across, there were several moments that took me out of the play or completely distracted from the play’s purpose.
The play starts with establishing two things at the very top; a very strict hierarchy between the workers and the boss, and the fact that this play ends in tragedy. There are two types of acting, in the play. First is the scene acting in the factory. The workers at the factory are mostly women and over half of them are women of color. Depending on the woman’s skin color, they were either treated in a more hostile manner or a more sexually aggressive manner. The second acting type are the monologues that happen between the factory scenes. They talk about the effects the fire had on the town.
There was a lot of disconnect between the actors and the script. Because the background of the story was rooted in a southern, rural town, a lot of the actors had to have deeper southern accents. Most of the actors were not good at maintain the accents throughout the play. The biggest culprit of that was the man who played the reverend I one of the monologues. He had no connection with how the character talked, so it pulled me out of the play during one of the most important monologues. Other than that, I thought the acting was good at getting its point