Featured photo: ‘Feed the Beast’ poster image
“I know what’s best for you,” Dr. Philip John tells one of his patients in a stark white lab room in Tuskegee, Alabama.
The play begins in 1932, following the lives of five Black men infected with syphilis — a disease they don’t know they have. John, a young Black doctor from Philadelphia, walks into the lab where the study takes place bright-eyed and full of hope. Ellis, the head custodian at the lab, offers John a cup of coffee and friendship — acting as a father figure and conscience to the young doctor over the years. But as the years slip past, John becomes entangled in the federal government’s web of deceit.
John is a character in Feed the Beast, a play about the Tuskegee experiment that made its debut at the International Black Theatre Festival on Tuesday in Winston-Salem.
Before the play began, tinny sounds of the blues percolated in the Agnes de Mille Theater at UNC School of the Arts, filled with Winston-Salem residents and visitors alike, both young and old — many old enough to have been alive while the study was being conducted.
To study the full progression of the disease, US Public Health Service doctors told 600 Black men — primarily sharecroppers, many of whom had never visited a doctor — that they were being treated for “bad blood,” a term commonly used to refer to a variety of maladies. The study involved 399 men with syphilis and a control group of 201 without it.
In 1947, fifteen years into the study, a simple shot of penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis. However, instead of treating them, John and other PHS doctors continued to allow the men they studied like Deacon, Benny, Clarence, Pee-Wee and Zeke to descend further into the deadly effects of the disease, giving them placebo pills such as aspirin and mineral supplements — all the while claiming that they were receiving the best care.
By the time the study concluded in 1972 — shut down due to public outrage when a PSH researcher leaked the story to the Associated Press — only 74 of the 399 infected had survived.
Feed the Beast comes to IBTF from the mind of Layon Gray, writer and director of other plays based on historical events such as Black Angels Over Tuskegee and Kings of Harlem.
“I love telling stories that people either don’t know about or don’t have enough information about,” Gray told TCB while resting on a blue bench outside the theater after the show. “I was always a history buff growing up.”
Gray also wrote the stage play Black Angels Over Tuskegee about the Tuskegee airmen, a group of Black military pilots and airmen who fought in World War II.
“I did a lot of reading, but I never heard of the Tuskegee airmen,” said Gray, who hails from Louisiana. “A lot of people didn’t know there were Black pilots during the 40s.”
In a twist of fate, Gray’s best friend’s neighbor was a Tuskegee airman who helped Gray bring the play to life.
“I had the opportunity to sit with him and listen to him talk, and what he always talked about was the brotherhood and the friendships he created, so I wrote that play with that in mind,” Gray explained.
Gray weaves a story that informs and entrances the audience, bound to theater seats while watching the experiment take place before their eyes.
Telling this story live with all the “raw emotions” is important to Gray.
“Nothing compares to live theater when you’re telling something from history and bringing people to life,” he emphasized.
Gray himself steps onto the stage as one of the characters, Clarence, who hopes to become a star and move out to California. All of the men have big dreams, but are advised by John not to leave the area so they can continue to receive “treatment.”
“I am a man, born into this world with nothing but the color of my skin. In Alabama, that alone is enough to condemn me to a life of struggle and pain,” Clarence exclaims as he delivers a monologue in the first act of the play, repeating the script as the years pass and he grows weaker. “These calloused hands have toiled for years on someone else’s land, yet I have nothing to show for it. It’s not fair, but I won’t let that stop me. I will keep fighting, day by day, because deep down I know I’m worth more than they will ever let me be.”
Outside the theater, resident Sheila Bailey told TCB that the play was “very touching.” The IBTF is like “Broadway for a week” for Bailey, who calls herself a “theater connoisseur.”
Bailey graduated from Winston-Salem State University in 1973, one year after the study was halted. “You gotta help people remember that that was before civil rights,” Bailey reflected. “They knew how to really present it in a way that it touched everybody.”
“I just want things to be better for our Black men,” Bailey said. “I think we still experience some of this in different ways.”
Buy tickets for the 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. showings of Feed the Beast on July 31 here.
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