Purlie Victorious (A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch) is a comedy play written by Ossie Davis in 1961. It tells the story of Purlie Victorious Judson, a reverend and small-time con man who returns to his hometown in rural Georgia to buy back the local church by conning Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee, the wealthy white landowner, out of an inheritance intended for Purlie's deceased cousin by passing off Lutiebell Gussie Mae Jenkins, a young woman he met while travelling, as her.
The play opened on Broadway with Davis himself in the title role in 1961 and ran through 1962. A revival was staged in 2023 with Leslie Odom Jr. as Purlie. In 1963 most of the original cast reprised their roles for a film adaptation, alternately titled Purlie Victorious or Gone Are the Days. In 1970 the play was adapted into a musical titled Purlie!
Tropes Associated With This Play Include:
- Badass Preacher: Purlie, to a degree. He's charismatic and good at thinking on his feet when it comes to his schemes, although at the end we see he doesn't always follow through.
- Died Standing Up: The fate of Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee.
- Epunymous Title: Purile is, indeed, victorious by the end.
- The Dog Bites Back: After suffering abuse at the hands of his father for much of the play, Charley gets back at him by revealing that while he did buy the Church as his father ordered him to he did it in Purlie's name. The shock of hearing this causes the Cap'n to die on his feet .
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Filmed Stage Production: In addition to the 1963 feature film, the 2023 revival was filmed for PBS's Great Performances. - Pygmalion Plot: Purlie has to train the naive and uneducated Luliebell to pass herself off as the college-educated Cousin Bee. Luliebell is hilariously bad at it, but almost manages to pull it off because of how stupid and Cotchipee is.
- The Quisling: Purlie's brother Gitlow is Cotchipee's overseer of the cotton workers and all-around Yes Man, especially when Cotchipee wants someone to help convince Charley that the local Black population is happy the way things are.
- Single Line of Descent: Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee tells his son Charley that the only reason he doesn't kill him is because he's the only Cotchipee descendent.
- Still Wearing the Old Colors: Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee is very proud of his family's confederate heritage and still styles himself as a Confederate-era plantation owner despite the play taking place in the Civil Rights era. In fact the whole town could be seen as this trope due to how the social structure is set up (see below).
- Stupid Good: Lutiebell, who never had a proper education, is one of the kindest and most big-hearted characters in the play. Charley, too, although he has enough education to be aware of the consequences of the Supreme Court's anti-discrimination cases, is still not that bright.
- A Taste of the Lash: A favorite punishment of Cotchipee. In fact, anger over his doing this to Purlie years in the past is one of Purlie's driving forces for finding a way to buy back the church.
- Work Off the Debt / Indentured Servitude: Due to Ol’ Cap’n Cotchipee owning most of the land and debt of the city's Black residents, the quality of life for them is barely better than it was during slavery. This was Truth in Television for many rural Black societies of the time, and one of Purlie's motivation for buying back the Church is to create a platform where he and others could preach and organize for freedom from his oppressive structure.
- Write What You Know: Many of the descriptions of punishments doled out to cotton pickers and other details of everyday life are taking directly from Ossie Davis's childhood.
