A free staged reading of Atomic Lullaby, a play by Linda Parsons, will be held on Sunday, November 2, 2-4 p.m. at the Old City Performing Arts Center, 111 State St, Knoxville. Kevin Collins directs a great cast: Caroline King, Deanna Surber, Raine Palmer, Abigail McCarter, and Caleb Burnham.

Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, the poetry editor for Madville Publishing, and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee.  Flying Anvil Theatre, Maryville College, Tennessee Wesleyan University, and Western Carolina University have produced her plays.

Parsons began writing plays in the early 1980s, interspersed with poetry, essays, and short prose. Atomic Lullaby tells both the actual and imagined story of her uncle and his family. The story is set in Oak Ridge, for maximum drama, with the mother and aunt of the returning sailor, Wade, being former calutron girls who labored to create the product, its identity and purpose unknown to them, as it was to most working around the clock to end the war.

Parsons was quoted in the Oak Ridger about the process to move from a staged reading to playwrighting and play development. “You must believe single-mindedly in your story. Through rewriting and re-visioning, living room and table readings, and staged readings, the process calls for belief and endurance. And I do believe. I was indeed driven to write Atomic Lullaby, I would even say divinely driven, to keep honing it, and my faith in the work and its potential to change minds and hearts has never waned.”

The Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) is sponsoring the staged reading, as we observe the 80th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. After the reading, a panel of experts will discuss the mythology surrounding the use of atomic weapons in light of current research. The panel will also address the long-term humanitarian effects of nuclear weapons development, use, misuse, and proliferation based on the tenets of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

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