Lazy playwrights

We opened Black Pearl Sings! last night! It was a great opening performance, the audience loved it and the 2 actresses in the show had maybe the best run we've had so far.

The story of the play is great, but I just really have a bone to pick with the playwright. There are so many historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the script it's just ridiculous. None of them are so major that they couldn't be fixed with a little tweaking, but they're also big enough that anyone who does even a tiny bit of googling will notice them immediately. The fact that they're there in the first place is really just appalling- he either did no research into the historical accuracy of what he was writing about, or he chose to completely disregard it. I need a little time to rant...

-The biggest inaccuracy is the fact that the play is set in 1933 and Susannah states multiple times that she wants to be the first female professor at Harvard. The first female professor at Harvard was Alice Hamilton, an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Medicine and a pioneer of workplace safety regulations who was hired in 1919.

-Another thing that bothers me is the terrible dialect that Pearl's lines are written in. She is from Hilton Head, and a part of the Gullah people. The Gullah dialect is extremely distinctive, and Pearl's lines are written phonetically in what I can only describe as some sort of generic, inconsistent, stereotypical poor grammar that bears no similarity whatsoever to the Gullah dialect. What bothers me the most, I think, is the inconsistency- she doesn't always use the singular instead of the plural. She doesn't always use incorrect verb tenses. She doesn't always drop the possessive. Just sometimes.

-Another historical inaccuracy- Pearl says "Those historical ladies last night say they got a motto- 'Well behaved women never make history.' " That phrase was coined by a woman named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich at some point in the 1970s.

-Another lovely inaccuracy- they mention in the play multiple times that the house across the street is "the narrowest house in New York" and "the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay lives there." Edna St. Vincent Millay really did live in the narrowest house in New York... for one year. 1923. A decade before the play takes place.

-Another brilliant lack of historical research on the playwright's part is the fact that in the summer of 1933, the governor of Texas (referred to in the play multiple times in the masculine, but never by name) was a woman named Ma Ferguson.

Plus the fact that he made the daughter's name Uniqua just irks me. It's drawn a laugh from the preview audience & the opening audience, and it's not supposed to be funny...