New Horizon Theater Staging ‘Feed the Beast’ at The Public (Sat., 2/15/25)

FEED THE BEAST by Layon Gray. New Horizon Theater Company. Through February 23.

When Covid-19 hit America, few sectors of our southern states feared federal health guidelines more than the black community. For decades, beginning well before the Civil War and lasting into the Vietnam War, black men had been used as walking petri dishes for any number of viral diseases for which our medical community had no cures. Or said they had none. Or, in fact, lied, hiding behind the ruse of clinical experiment for the greater good. Perhaps the greatest outrage of all happened in Tuskegee, Alabama, when, in 1932, a study group of 700 men with syphilis were enjoined to a placebo study of penicillin. The horrific story, captured on stage in Miss Evers’ Boys (and later made into a film,) has become the stuff of nightmares shared by many. Here, playwright Layon Gray, author of Black Angels Over Tuskegee, follows the lives of five men who for 40 years lived the lie of the Tuskegee study. Examine the case. Pittsburgh Public Theater’s Helen Wayne Rauh Rehearsal Hall. 621 Penn Ave., Cultural District. (C.P.O.) 

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