Matter of Intent

by Gary Earl Ross

Overview

*Winner of the 2005 Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America.
*Winner of the 2005 Emanuel Fried Outstanding New Play Award.
*A featured selection of the 2009 NAAA Crossing the Divide Festival in London, England.

In this tense courtroom drama, it is 1960, and America is beginning to shake off the sleepy Fifties. Kennedy and Nixon vie for the White House. Sam Cooke and Chubby Checker electrify radio audiences. The Untouchables and Perry Mason are on TV as lunch counter sit-ins spread throughout the segregated South. And in Buffalo, New York, a live-in housekeeper is found holding a bloody knife and crying over the body of her employer. Now immersed in her first capital case, one of the city's three black women lawyers is locked in the courtroom fight of her life. No one doubts the defendant the press calls "the Negro Lizzie Borden" murdered socialite Kate Wayborn. But if Temple Scott is to keep young Mae Lou McKitchen out of the electric chair, she must uncover the truth behind the crime. Murder, you see, is always a matter of intent . . .

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012981752
Publisher:	The Writer's Den
Publication date:	09/05/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	842 KB

About the Author

Novelist, playwright, anthologist, popular culture scholar, and public radio essayist Gary Earl Ross is a language arts professor at the University at Buffalo Educational Opportunity Center. With more than 170 publications, he has won awards for fiction, poetry, drama, and public radio commentary. He is the author of the short story collections The Wheel of Desire (2000) and Shimmerville (2002), and the novel Blackbird Rising (2009). Ross edited Nickel City Nights (2008) and co-edited (with Gunilla Theander Kester) The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407 (2010) and The Still Empty Chair (2011). In addition to Matter of Intent, Ross is the author of six other stage plays already produced or scheduled for production: Sleepwalker (2002), Picture Perfect (2007), The Best Woman (2007), Murder Squared (2010), The Scavenger’s Daughter (2011-12), and The Mark of Cain (2012). A member of the Just Buffalo Literary Center, Mystery Writers of America, the Dramatist Guild, and the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association (for which he edits the academic journal Almanack), Ross is also resident playwright and board president for Buffalo’s renowned Ujima Company. For more information visit www.garyearlross.com.

Editorial Reviews

Mae Lou is found kneeling over her boss' bloody, dead body. . . By all accounts, Mae Lou McKitchen, a young black house keeper of limited intelligence and staggered speech, appears guilty of murder. . . But did she commit the crime? "Matter of Intent" is an account of a crime without a witness, a society without perspective, and a criminal-justice system that is anything but just.

Benjamin Siegel

If you enjoy a good mystery, then the play "Matter Of Intent" is for you. It is playing now through April 24th, at the Ujima Theater Company, located at 545 Elmwood Avenue. This is a unique murder mystery written by Buffalo's own multi-talented author and playwright, Gary Earl Ross. (It)touches upon a variety of tough issues that include incest, rape and racism . . . This is a real mystery with a surprise ending. It will hold your interest from beginning to end.

Eva Doyle

Gary Earl Ross's new play, Matter of Intent, is a Perry Mason style drama, complete with courtroom histrionics and melodramatic plot twists. At its heart, however, is something more. . . a compelling character, Temple Scott, a black woman struggling to make a living as an attorney in Buffalo, New York of the early 1960s. As in the Perry Mason television series, this play wears its moral themes on its sleeve, but to very different effect.The playwright has a fine sense of drama.

Anthony Chase

Matter of Intent, a play by Gary Earl Ross, produced at the Theater Loft (in Buffalo), was named winner of a 2006 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, it was announced April 27.

Named for Edgar Allan Poe, the Edgar Awards honor the best in mystery writing. Ross' play was one of four nominated new works in the Edgars' (2005) Best Play category. All four nominees were produced outside of New York City.

Kenneth Jones