Critic-turned-playwright dramatizes Atlanta laundresses’ strike of 1881

“But on both sides of my family, people talk about what happened. What we survived, what we went through. It gives us a way to ground ourselves. We know we’re resilient,” she continues, lingering in front of the wall of photos and explaining who’s who.

Smith honored her grandmothers and other women in her family tree by lending their names to fictional characters in her new play “The Wash,” a 2024 selection of the prestigious National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere program.

Credits: [email protected]

Credits: [email protected]

The comedy-drama, which chronicles a real-life Atlanta laundresses’ strike in 1881, just finished its run in June at Synchronicity Theatre and has transferred to Impact Theatre in Hapeville, where it will play through July 28 with the same cast. Under the new play project, it will be played in theaters in St. Louis and Chicago in 2025.

“With The Wash, you have a play that is thematically fascinating and tells a story that most people don’t know,” says Nan Barnett, executive director of the National New Play Network. “But it’s a story that’s very relevant today. And I think that’s something that really speaks to people.”

“The Wash” is part of Smith’s “Reconstruction Trilogy,” three plays set between 1865 and 1881, based on historical facts but mostly invented by her. It is the first of the three to be produced.

Smith titled “The Wash” after the adage “what doesn’t come out in the wash comes out in the rinse.”

“I believe that in the 21st century we are living in the wake of the past, in the unfinished business of the Reconstruction era,” she writes in the program notes.

“When I was growing up, there weren’t a lot of people of color in our history books,” she says. “But I’m here, so I know someone was here before me. But who were they?”

She sits on the screened-in back porch of the house where she lived as a teenager in a quiet Gwinnett suburb near Loganville; birdsong filters from the backyard as she relaxes barefoot in jeans and a white blouse.

“One of the ways oppression works is by making you believe that you have to constantly start over,” she continues.

“African Americans feel like they have to start over. By telling these stories, we show that there is indeed a foundation, that a foundation has been laid. You don’t always have to start over.”

Kelundra Smith’s beginnings date back to age 34, when her father Ray, a salesman, combined parts of three cousins’ names to create a new and unique name, just for her. (Her mother Constance is a professor of social work at the University of Georgia.)

Originally from Atlanta, she grew up in the DeKalb County section of Stone Mountain, then moved to Gwinnett County as a teenager and attended South Gwinnett High School.

She was an imaginative child, she said, who drew on walls, made up stories with her Barbies and got into trouble for talking too much in class. She found a book of Maya Angelou poems at age 10 and decided to write her own poems, using multi-colored gel pens.

When she transferred to her new high school, she got involved in theater to make friends, then joined drama clubs and public speaking competitions, but still had no intention of becoming a playwright.

When she graduated high school, her goal was to become editor-in-chief of Seventeen magazine. When she remembers that, she laughs, deeply and heartily, which she does regularly.

With that goal in mind, she majored in journalism at the University of Georgia, then majored in theater. She earned her master’s degree in arts administration from Syracuse University and worked in public relations and marketing until she decided it wasn’t for her: “I don’t have enough of an attachment to money to be motivated by it,” she says.

Returning to journalism, she wrote theater reviews for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the ArtsATL website, then launched a successful freelance writing career with articles in The New York Times, Food & Wine magazine and the Bitter Southerner.

On a mission in 2017, she saw an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., about the Atlanta washerwomen’s strike of 1881, a rare achievement for black people and unions at the time.

Credits: Casey Gardner Ford

Credits: Casey Gardner Ford

Fascinated by the little-known event, she dug deeper, reading Tera Hunter’s book about the strike, “To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War,” and newspaper articles from the time.

She handed in the assignment.

“I thought I was done.”

She wasn’t. Her head was still full of the whole story, she was going to her parents’ house shortly after and a scene came to her mind.

“I saw a woman with a shotgun in one hand and a lantern in the other, she was in her nightgown, she was sneaking around a corner because she thought someone was in her house. But it was her friend who was putting rice and beans in jars because that’s what they’re going to have to share with the other women in their laundry cooperative for their wages. And I heard their conversation as I was driving.”

Back home, she sat down and hand-wrote the first 35 pages of “The Wash.”

“Not only is it historical, but it also speaks a lot to the experiences of laundresses,” says Amina McIntyre, co-founder of Hush Harbor Lab, an Atlanta-based new play development company that worked with Smith to develop “The Wash.”

“She shared their lived experiences, their humor, their lives, their joy, their losses and the particular pains and problems they face.”

Since then, Smith has been on a whirlwind of artistic endeavors. In addition to the Reconstruction trilogy, she has written Other Paths to God, which she calls a “dark mystery comedy.” The text grew out of conversations with nurses at Grady Memorial Hospital as part of Horizon Theatre’s Black Women Speak initiative, which commissions and directs new plays by black women.

“One of the challenges for playwrights is always telling stories that interest you, but do they interest other people?” says Lisa Adler, Horizon’s artistic director. So during the pandemic, the theater has hosted Zoom meetings between Black playwrights and community members to discuss issues and concerns that could inform new plays, “to try to capture the zeitgeist of what’s happening in people’s lives,” she says.

“Other Paths to God” is the result of these conversations.

“She’s a very, very talented and driven writer,” Adler adds.

In 2023, Smith was appointed editor of American Theatre magazine, to which she had been a regular contributor. As she established herself as both a creator of her own work and a critic of others’, she noticed the differences in how each presented itself.

“For me, journalism and critical writing is like architecture, the construction of a building. You construct the critique in your mind like you watch a play.

“Playwriting doesn’t work that way for me,” she continues. “When I sit down to write a play, I feel less like I’m in control of the story as a playwright than as a critic. It’s a great irony, because most people think it’s the other way around.”

“Washing.” Through July 28. $27 to $80. Impact Theatre, 599 N. Central Ave., Atlanta. 470-239-0620, impacttheatreatlanta.org.