Two-time Tony nominee Carrie Robbins, costume designer for over 30 Broadway productions including Grease, Over Here! and Irving Berlin's White Christmas, dons playwright's garb next week when her pair of one-acts based on short stories by New York surgeon RD Robbins open Off-Broadway at HERE May 21 for a limited run through June 7.
The plays' subject matter is a long way from the glitz and glamour of Broadway musicals. Both depict the grim human costs of war. Sawbones deals with racial dynamics in an ill-equipped field hospital in Virginia during the Civil War. Robbins notes that "During the Civil War, on the North side, the USCT (U.S. Colored Troops), were permitted to fight and die for freedom from slavery. But only 3 men of color who had managed to earn M.D. degrees were commissioned officers and allowed to treat the injured. (They had to get their M.D.s from U of Glasgow & Trinity College, Ontario.)" The play "tells the story of just such a black man, Jebidiah Wall, who, with the help of Dr. Cordell Cuttaridge, awakes to his potential as a man of medicine."
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