Pearl Cleage. Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, GA, 30 Apr.-15 June 1997. Dir. Kenny Leon. Set Design by Marjorie Bradley Kellog. Costume Design by Susan E. Mickey. Lighting Design by Ann G. Wrightson. Musical Direction and Composition by Dwight Andrews. Sound Design by Brian Kettler. Cast Charlie Thompson Terry Alexander Tyrone Washington Taurean Blacque Rosa St. John Andrea Frye May Thompson Carol Mitchell-Leon The production of Bourbon at the Border at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in an extended run from April 30 through June 15, 1997, marks the third successful artistic collaboration between playwright Pearl Cleage and Kenny Leon, Artistic Director of the Alliance, who also directed Flyin' West (1992) and Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995, with a return engagement during the 1996 Olympic Games). Through these three plays, Cleage seeks to bring us to grips with our American past and help us understand and acknowledge its impact on present conditions, especially with regard to issues of race and gender. Great events are seen not through the eyes of leaders and celebrities, but through the experiences of the ordinary people who lived them. In Flyin' West, a domestic melodrama becomes a polemic against domestic violence while it addresses the issues of what constitutes and defines a family and whether black nationalism will hold together the community of Nicodemus, Kansas, founded by the Exodusters who "flew" West to escape racist oppression during the late nineteenth century. Blues for an Alabama Sky is set in 1930 as the realization sets in that the Stock Market Crash has become the Great Depression. In a Harlem tenement, against the backdrop of a community divided over Margaret Sanger's attempt to open a birth control clinic and the issue of reproductive rights, one character, Angel (originally portrayed by Phylicia Rashad), accustomed to living in search of someone to take care of her, changes the lives of friends and lovers by failing to accept her responsibility for the shaping of her own destiny. The action of Bourbon at the Border takes place in 1995, but actually pivots around the events of Freedom Summer, the black voter registration drive which took place in Mississippi in 1964. Murdered volunteer workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Cheney were only three among the causalities of that effort. Two surviving casualties, Charlie and May, are the focal characters of Bourbon at the Border. During the thirty years since Freedom Summer they have tried to help each other cope with wounds that could not be healed, outrage that could not be quelled, and guilt that they could do so little to protect each other. They live in a small apartment near the Ambassador Bridge which connects Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario. Their odyssey to escape their pain has led them there, "like desperados drinking bourbon at the border and planning our getaway. …