Clay's Place: Inside My Blue Mind at the Front Row Fringe Festival

 It is 1956 in Memphis, TN.  Blacks were still reeling from the tragic murder of a 14-year-old young man by the name of Emmett Till just a year earlier in neighboring Mississippi. Clay Carter and Turner Davis are first cousins. Born in the lower Mississippi Delta, as teens they hopped a train aiming to leave the deceptive, one-sided sharecropping system in search of a better life.  Chicago was the goal but 240 miles from Greenville, MS was as far as they made it. Shelby County, TN. The setting is the popular downtown Beale, the Soul of Memphis, complete with its black-owned shops, stores and carnival atmosphere coupled with an indulgent nightlife that seduced many to engage in their clandestine vices. Lounges, clubs, gambling, prostitution, and incredible music; boogie-woogie and especially the blues; Beale had an allure that was hard to resist. Could they really find success in a society that despised them solely based on the color of their skin, because they were black men? Clay and Turner will be tested, tempted, and tormented; both with their own individual secrets that will either destroy them or deliver them.