The Member of the Wedding

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Member of the Wedding, The, novel by Carson McCullers, published in 1946 and dramatized by the novelist in 1950.

Frankie Adams, a lonely, sensitive, 12‐year‐old girl, lives in a small Southern town with her widowed father and Berenice Sadie Brown, the warm, understanding, thrice‐married black cook. Except for play with Berenice and John Henry West, her bespectacled six‐year‐old cousin, Frankie is “a member of nothing” until her brother Jarvis and his fiancée, Janice, ask her to be a member of their wedding and she suffers the misapprehension that they will live as a happy threesome. On the day before the wedding, sure that it is her last at home, she makes a farewell tour of the town, meets a drunken soldier who invites her to a tryst, another of her many experiences with problems of love, chance, and selfhood, and she violently resists his advances. The wedding itself becomes another unhappy experience because of her unbudging refusal to get out of the honeymoon car as she hysterically cries “Take me, take me.” Sadly determined to escape home and find experience, Frankie runs away, but is found at the café where she had met the soldier and is brought back to her house. Although John Henry dies of meningitis and Berenice leaves for her own new marriage, Frankie, now 13, manages to recover from her painful past in the new happiness of close friendship with a contemporary, Mary Littlejohn, with whom she imaginatively plans a trip around the world.

Member of the Wedding, The (1950), a play by Carson McCullers. [Empire Theatre, 501 perf.; NYDCC Award.] Frankie Addams ( Julie Harris), a lonely, sensitive twelve‐year‐old girl, lives in a small southern town with a widowed father, who ignores her, and Berenice Sadie Brown ( Ethel Waters), the warm, understanding, thrice‐married “Negro” cook. Only Berenice and Frankie's bespectacled six‐year‐old cousin John Henry West ( Brandon de Wilde) make life bearable for Frankie until her brother Jarvis ( James Holden) returns from the army and asks her to be a member of his wedding party. Frankie is thrilled, then shattered when she realizes that she cannot accompany them on their honeymoon, as she had expected to do. Although John Henry dies of meningitis and Berenice leaves to get married again, the first stirrings of adolescent romance promise better days for Frankie. The play was adapted by the playwright from her novel of the same name. Although most critics had initially held serious reservations about the work, questioning the play's construction, the luminous performances made the Robert Whitehead offering a surprise hit, capping Waters's career and launching Harris into stardom. Revivals by the Phoenix Theatre in 1975, with Mary Beth Hurt and Marge Elliott, and by the Roundabout Theatre in 1989, with Amelia Campbell and Esther Rolle, confirmed the play's stage worthiness.