12:00 pm
Experimental Theater Amherst College
Free and open to the public - reservations recommended call 413.545.1972

Written by John O'Neal and Barbara Watkins
With additional text by Steve Kent, Michael Keck and Timothy Raphael
Directed by John O'Neal
Based on the original production directed by Steve Kent

"Though I've lived in the city the last twenty years or so, I still yearn for the small town because that's where my youth occurred. That's where this show comes from, the view that small town values are a lot more coherent---that our values in America are basically agrarian and that we haven't yet learned to adapt them to urban life." -John O'Neal

In You Can't Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover, Junebug Jabbo Jones is the narrator of stories, this time mostly about others, especially "Phillip Anthony Tatum, called "Po" Tatum, because he liked to eat spuds". We follow Po's story from early boyhood in Pike County, Mississippi to his last desperate hours on earth, in a westside Chicago building. It is clear that Po is a symbol of many black young people who move from their rural, southern homes to hard northern cities. It is a tale told with lots of humor and turn-of-phrase wisdom, that in the end, offers the audience serious and thought provoking issues to consider.

About the character, Junebug Jabbo Jones:

Junebug comes from a long line of African storytellers. Aesop, the African was one of Junebug's forebears. The innumerable praise-singers, the oral historians who have carried the records of events and the families of African peoples from time immemorial to now, are ancestors to the Junebug. The tales of Anansi the spider, the Uncle Remus tales, the John and Master tales, Langston Hughes' character, Simple, the street corner poets who chime the rhymes of Shine and Stagolee...all these and more are ancestors to this keeper of dreams and other sacred things.

The Junebug character that we have created three plays around is a folk hero. Although Junebug himself can be dated back to the early 1960's, he is an expression as old as the ages. Wherever and whenever oppressed people have taken stock of their situations and begun to consider what to do about it, Junebug or somebody like him is closeby.