FROM THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA, Kuumba Theatre Company, at Malcolm X College. Kuumba Theatre has returned to celebrate its 30th-anniversary season with a sturdy revival of a stirring survival saga. In this burning memoir, Endesha Ida Mae Holland spills her life story, from rape victim to prostitute to civil rights worker to American studies professor, with heartbreaking specificity and complete conviction. Most memorably the play recalls the author’s mother, Ida Mae Holland, a woman who headed north but never got there, spending her life in Greenwood, Mississippi, ironing white people’s clothes, running a boardinghouse, and serving as a midwife to women abandoned by the white medical establishment. Ida Mae Holland, who initially opposed civil rights workers for stirring up trouble, died in a fire set by the KKK. The mother’s courage inspired the daughter to fight for the rights Ida Mae never knew.
