ZULU FITS MPAACT
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Neecee and Giselle are comfortably middle-class African-American sisters with a shared fixation on Jersey Jack Black, a convicted cop killer and cause celebre in the Mumia Abu-Jamal vein. Inspired by his YouTube rants, the two teens style themselves the Blow-Up Sistas and hatch a scheme to bust Black out of the big house, using semi-salacious webcasts to raise funds and recruit Buddy, a hapless post office truck driver who delivers mail to the prison.
At points nearly everyone in the play experiences the “Zulu fits” of the title, a sort of seizure—not unlike the one Herald Loomis suffers in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, when he envisions skeletal slaves crossing the Middle Passage—in which images of past atrocities take hold. The Blow-Up Sistas, for instance, live in a house reputed to have once belonged to a woman who captured free blacks and sold them into slavery with help from her own black servants, and are overcome by the spirits of those servants from time to time. Even cynical Jersey Jack gets the fits.
