My Children, My Africa
INFO 773-871-3000
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
O’Neal had come to SMU from Canada, where he’d been producing the Stratford Festival. Before that, in the 70s, he’d been a leading light in Chicago’s off-Loop theater scene as an original member of the innovative Organic Theater Company, appearing in the troupe’s hugely popular science-fantasy stage serial Warp! and other shows.
Bleacher Bums had been Gilyard’s stepping-stone to TV and film jobs: spots on Diff’rent Strokes, Simon & Simon, The Facts of Life, and CHiPS, a lead role alongside up-and-coming Jim Carrey on the short-lived sitcom The Duck Factory, four seasons on Matlock as the assistant to Andy Griffith’s crafty lawyer, supporting parts in Top Gun and Die Hard, and the role of Pastor Bruce Barnes in Left Behind, a 2000 screen adaptation of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s series of apocalyptic novels.
Though set against the backdrop of a system that no longer exists, the play “speaks to continuing problems of oppression in the world because of racial, social, and religious differences,” says O’Neal. “The debate at the core of the play is ongoing: how to arrive at a place of justice without armed conflict, through reason or through violence.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Photofest and Jim Newberry.
