I absolutely love this production—you got it exactly right! Not easy—the tone is so tricky, both comic and deadly serious at the same time—! But it is a brilliant adaptation. I cannot even imagine a writer who has ever been better served ... or a more entertaining show.
— Lee Smith
Lee Smith’s “Tongues of Fire”
Adapted and Directed by Brenda P. Schleunes
70 minutes
Photo by Kathy Dollyhigh
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- About the Kinfolk Series
The year I was thirteen—1957—my father had a nervous breakdown, my brother had a wreck and I started speaking in tongues.
So begins Lee Smith’s "Tongues of Fire", a story of teen-age dislocation and bewilderment when a middle-class family’s circumstances spin out of control. With a mother firmly focused on “rising above” the nervous breakdown, and “keeping up appearances at all costs,” teen-age Karen longs for attention. She eventually finds it in a working class, primitive church where she is baptized in a plastic swimming pool and speaks in tongues.
"Tongues of Fire," like other stories by Lee Smith, is rich in detail, comic yet dark, and filled with references to music. "Tongues of Fire" is accompanied by a women’s a cappella trio.
