A remarkable event in American labor history, little known today, is the Atlanta washerwomen’s strike of 1881. The successful action was organized by underpaid, overworked Black women who washed everybody’s dirty clothes by hand back in the day before homes had laundry machines. Their summertime strike literally stunk up Atlanta for weeks just as the city was about to host an international cotton exposition intended to celebrate the revitalized New South.
This episode in history is an uplifting saga about hundreds of poor Southern Black women, some of them formerly enslaved people, many illiterate, who joined forces to demand one dollar for washing, folding and delivering twelve pounds of laundry. A hostile city government and angry customers balked. Police brutality and unjust licensing fees resulted, but the women remained staunch and their numbers grew.
The Wash is Kelundra Smith’s new drama regarding those times. Smith’s two-act play offers eye-opening details about post-Reconstruction conditions leading to the strike, the backbreaking labor of washing laundry circa 1881, and what these hardy working women faced as individuals and mothers.
The Wash is not a documentary. It is instead a slice of history rendered not so compellingly as a fictionalized human drama. Composed by Smith in a comfortable, semi-realistic style, the work’s greater value is found among the historical and social information filtered through the voices of its six fictional characters, rather than in the play’s conventional action and so-so dialogue. Fortunately, the actual struggle that galvanizes and unites these women generates a dramatic impetus that keeps The Wash chugging along.
Eunice Woods quietly and fervently anchors the drama as Anna, a kindly older soul whose home-run laundry is jeopardized by block-busting taxes and folks, white and Black, who pay their bills with beans, leftovers or not at all. A spirited Bianca LaVerne Jones is Anna’s feisty bestie who doubts the strike’s prospects. Margaret Odette, Alicia Pilgrim, Kerry Warren and Rebecca Haden depict other washerwomen. These figures, whose lives represent issues like domestic abuse, infant mortality, same-sex attraction and professional aspirations, otherwise tend to be indistinctly written beings. Observing the show at a preview last week, it appeared the artists had not been allowed sufficient rehearsal to flesh out their characters entirely. By now their performances likely are more realized.
Opening on Thursday in its New York premiere at the 99-seat WP Theater, The Wash is produced by the New Federal Theatre, now in its sixth decade presenting works created by artists of color. Awoye Timpo, the director, stages the play upon a modest, rustic indoor/outdoor setting flexibly designed by Jason Ardizzone-West to accommodate projections by Abhita Austin that at times suggest sheets flapping in the breeze or display typographic excerpts from press reports on the strike. A smart selection of period and instrumental music lends a sense of authenticity and smooths transitions between scenes. (Perhaps the mix might have used John Philip Sousa’s “King Cotton March” commissioned for the expo.)
Timpo’s production offers a wordless opening scene choreographed by Adesola Osakalumi and Jill M. Vallery that presents the women rhythmically scrubbing laundry with washboards in metal tubs, hanging items along clotheslines, ironing and folding garments and altogether providing a lyrical visual sense of their daily drudgery. It is a striking sequence unlike the remainder of the play, which plainly relates the panoramic story from the washerwomen’s perspective. It’s surprising this genuine American saga has not yet been filmed in a major way.
The Wash opened June 5, 2025, at WP Theater and runs through June 29. Tickets and information: newfederaltheatre.com
