Kelundra Smith is the managing editor of American Theatre Magazine, a theater critic, an AIR MAIL contributor, and now a playwright. The Wash, which had its premiere in Atlanta on June 7, is set in 1881 and takes us into the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike, which was spearheaded by 20 Black women and timed just weeks before the city was to host the International Cotton Exposition. Smith learned of the strike when she visited an exhibition on post-Civil War Reconstruction. Seeing both the power and the humor in the subject, she began writing during the pandemic, creating an interracial cast of women who fight for their rights and higher wages. “The conversation is so similar in 2024 as it was in 1881 that it is scary,” Smith recently told Atlanta magazine. “The term ‘essential workers’ is not new—the laundry women, in letters to the mayor, described themselves as essential workers, saying, ‘We provide an essential service to the sanitation of this city and we should be allowed to set our own rates.’” The Wash is already scheduled for productions in St. Louis and Chicago. —Laura Jacobs