Brutal Imagination Audiobook By Cornelius Eady cover art

Brutal Imagination

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Brutal Imagination

By: Cornelius Eady
Narrated by: Joe Morton, Sally Murphy
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Tony Award® nominee Joe Morton and stage veteran Sally Murphy star in this award-winning play based on a tragic true story. Using excerpts from real newspaper transcripts, Brutal Imagination reexamines the case of Susan Smith, a white mother who falsely accused a Black man of carjacking her and kidnapping her two young children. The riveting story, written by poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Cornelius Eady presents listeners with a unique perspective on the harrowing nine days between the fabricated crime and Smith’s eventual confession. As illuminating and resonant today as ever, Brutal Imagination confronts the patterns of injustice that have haunted African American men for decades.

©2001 Cornelius Eady (P)2021 AO Media LLC Thought-Provoking Emotionally Gripping Theater Entertainment & Performing Arts

About the Creator

Cornelius Eady is the author of Brutal Imagination, finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry. The play, based on the book, premiered at the Vineyard Theatre in New York in 2002, and received The Oppenheimer Award. In addition to Brutal Imagination, Eady has collaborated with jazz composer Deidre Murray on several theater pieces, including Running Man (finalist, Pulitzer Prize in Drama), You Don't Miss Your Water, and Fangs.
Eady is also the author of Hardheaded Weather (2008); the autobiography of a jukebox (1997); You Don't Miss Your Water (1995); The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; BOOM BOOM BOOM (1988); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), chosen for the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Kartunes (1980).
In 1996, Eady and the poet Toi Derricote founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving Black poets of various backgrounds and acting as a safe space for intellectual engagement and critical debate. His honors include an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Rochester, the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, a Lila Wallace- Reader's Digest Award, The Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, The Elizabeth Kray Award from Poets House, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Eady is also a songwriter and musician, collaborating with his folk trio and band Rough Magic. He has served as director of the Poetry Center at SUNY Stony Brook and director of the MFA Program for Writers at the University of Notre Dame and as the Miller Family Chair at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
In fall 2021, he will become Chair of Excellence in Poetry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a position previously held by the US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.

Joe Morton
Sally Murphy

About the Performer

Joe Morton is an Emmy Award-winning film, television, and stage veteran, best known as Rowan/Eli Pope in Shonda Rhimes's groundbreaking series Scandal. He most recently starred as Reverend Arthur Finer on the series God Friended Me and recurs on The Politician. Morton is also known for his iconic roles in the films The Brother from Another Planet, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Justice League, and Speed, among many others. He made his Broadway debut in the Tony Award-winning musical Hair, followed by his starring role in Raisin, for which he garnered a Tony nomination and Theatre World Award. In 2016, Morton returned to his theater roots, portraying the iconic comedian Dick Gregory in the one-man show Turn Me Loose Off Broadway and was honored with the NAACP Theatre Lifetime Achievement Award. He reprised his role in Turn Me Loose at The Wallis-Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in fall 2017.

About the Performer

Sally Murphy has appeared extensively on Broadway, and in film and television. Her many Broadway credits include August: Osage County, The Minutes, Linda Vista, The Wild Party, Fiddler on the Roof, The Grapes of Wrath and Lincoln Center’s Carousel, where she starred as Julie Jordan. She has appeared Off Broadway in various productions at The Public Theater, Atlantic Theater, Signature Theatre, and Vineyard Theatre, among others. Murphy is a member of Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where she has appeared many times, and has also performed at London’s National Theatre and in Berlin, Vienna, and Sydney. Her film and television credits include Succession, Chicago Med, Law & Order SVU, The Good Wife, Scent of a Woman, Fearless, If These Walls Could Talk, and Pollock. She resides in New York City and is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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With no expectation, with no bias, with no guilt, with no anger, with no finger-pointing or stones in hand to cast...from a place of loss, disappointment, desperation, and impressions not of your own choosing...just listen...not just to this (I won't classify) but to echoes of thoughts and conversations about this and the parallel echoes this invokes. This is an opportunity to empathize with both sides of a topic we aren't comfortable with and possibly be gentle when we have to do so in the future. We've all been misunderstood. Let this be a start of relating to that feeling and seeking to understand before judging. This is a lesson we hate to admit we get wrong but desperately need to learn.

Please...

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This was a great production. I read the book it was based on and saw the play many years ago. A listener should come to this presentation aware that it's poetry that's more on the evocative, non-linear side rather than conventional prose writing. It also combines creative interpretations of the actual events with news text and excerpts from real interviews. If you come at it with an open mind and an appreciation for more "out of the box" thinking, you'll love this new way of presenting poetry, historical cases of racial profiling and true crimes. The actors and production team are spot-on. They really bring the characters to life and make us remember the two child victims of this tragedy.

excellent writing and production

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I'm not sure if everyone remembers this news story that was a nationwide search. The author and narrators were great.

Brilliant illustration of a past news story!

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Hard to listen because it takes on hard truths about racism, how we usually see what we want to see, and how the unthinkable is sometimes true and yet hidden under easy prejudices.

Heartbreaking

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Wonderful actors wasted on an overdramatic presentation.

The murdered kids became almost a footnote. I was hoping to hear more about them.

Belaboured, overwrought

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