Ruth' confronts historical prejudice with puppets

• Center for Puppetry Arts
• NO STRINGS ATTACHED: The central family of 'Ruth and the Green Book'

“Travel is fatal to prejudice,” a quotation from Mark Twain, appeared on the cover of The Negro Motorist Green Book in the 1950s. The guide provided an invaluable service to African-American travelers in the Jim Crow era by identifying safe service stations, restaurants, and boarding houses. The Green Book itself has traveled across the decades to inspire two stage plays in Atlanta’s 2011-2012 theatrical season. Last fall, Theatrical Outfit’s The Green Book used such characters as a go-getting young salesman and a Jewish Holocaust survivor to explore the different facets of racism in the United States following World War II.

The Center for Puppetry Arts’ world premiere production Ruth and the Green Book takes a simpler, more family-friendly approach to fraught moment in American history. Adapted and directed by Jon Ludwig from the children’s book by Calvin Alexander Ramsey and Floyd Cooper, Ruth and the Green Book presents a hopeful, exuberant musical without glossing over the evils of segregation.