"Miss Evers' Boys," by Cornell's David Feldshuh, was performed in New York City March 19-April 5. Brenda Tobias, director of Cornell's Office of New York City Communications, was there and contributed this review.

Credit: Nathan Johnson

"My body is my freedom," Willie plaintively cries to Nurse Evers as he begins to cripple from untreated disease. This disease – syphilis, or "bad blood" – is the focus of the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" – and of Professor David Feldshuh's Pulitzer-nominated play "Miss Evers' Boys," a production of the Red Fern Theatre Company at the Shell Theater in Manhattan from March 19 to April 5.

The play centers on Willie, Ben, Caleb and Hodman, four of approximately 400 African-American men in Macon County, Ala., recruited in the 1930s into the U.S. Public Health Service's now-notorious Tuskegee study.

The quartet is a musical group that features Willie as their tap dancer. Their affection for Nurse Evers, sent from Tuskegee Institute to recruit the men into the syphilis study, leads them to name their group "Miss Evers' Boys." These song-and-dance men lend a joy and vibrancy to a deeply unsettling tale. Under the direction of Melanie Moyer Williams, executive artistic director of the Red Fern Theatre, the music performed by the quartet and by an offstage pianist creates a full-bodied and Technicolor production that bursts the seams of the small black box theater. Williams masterfully directs the multi-talented cast with all the artistry and aplomb of a Broadway production.

The play, written by Feldshuh, artistic director of the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts and a medical doctor, brings great humanity to this American travesty with his focus on Evers. She is the lens through which the audience comes to better understand how good people can become complicit in atrocity.

Evers' dedication to her patients and to the doctors makes it possible to see beyond the obviousness of evil. Losing the fight with the doctors to administer the new wonder drug penicillin to her patients, Evers sputters: "These men are susceptible to my kindness" – with a sense of deep regret.

The play spans 40 years and leads to a Senate hearing on the study in 1972. The deceit and harm the men endure throughout those years play out in small, incremental steps that occur so slowly that they seem almost normal. There is a universality to this phenomenon that is deeply disturbing.

By the end of the play, the characters have aged, or died – or in the case of just one patient, prevailed. Without ever losing its dramatic integrity, "Miss Evers' Boys" tells a story deeply rich in details and nuance.

The play, through its music and rich characterization, is filled with joy as it tells a tale of sorrow. It is of some comfort that revelations of the failures of the Tuskegee study have brought about many of the current rules and regulations mandatory in human-subject studies.