The Old Settler

Husband has come to Harlem from South Carolina to search for his girlfriend, Lou Bessie Preston. Also living with Elizabeth is her sister, Quilly McGrath, fifty-three

There is an ominous cloud of tension that hangs over Elizabeth and Quilly's relationship. This tension is further exacerbated when Elizabeth and Husband take to liking each other

Quilly, who doesn't like Husband living with them in the first place, surely doesn't approve of their "carrying on," especially since Elizabeth is old enough to be Husband's mother

It is this "carrying on" that exposes a thirty-year-old wound which, until now, only had a bandage - now the wound can heal for the sisters

"The Old Settler [is] Redwood's gentle, sweet-natured comedy about life in Harlem in 1943. It's a play that chooses to remember the good without the bad, being about the relationship of two aging, church-going sisters and what happens when a handsome young fellow, newly arrived from the Deep South, rents a room in the apartment they share

For all of its decent sentiments,The Old Settler avoids sentimentality. It has the authenticity and lack of pretense of an Early American sampler" ~ NY Times

" good naturalism does more than reproduce: It listens with passion and humor, and it shapes what it hears into powerful form The Old Settler by John Henry Redwoodpresents the lives of two fortyish sisters Mr Redwood has said he modeled these sisters on his mother and aunt ..

..It's a lovely play, moving in its pretty unsurprising central anecdote and more moving in its densely textured picture of Harlem life in 1943" ~ Wall Street Journal