Epic Bitch Fight

Chitterling Heights is a play about two powerful black artists at the beginning of the civil rights era. And it's about their bickering. The action unfolds at the country house of Lorraine Hansberry, famed author of Raisin in the Sun. Her guest is James Baldwin, a revolutionary writer who tackled race and homosexuality at a time when neither of those subjects, let alone their intersection, were kosher in American culture.

He's brought along what's described by the Women's Theatre Project as a "not-quite-innocent Southern protege" -- his boyfriend, perhaps? Baldwin starts a war of words with Hansberry in her own home; he labels her work "irrelevant." Hansberry can't be happy about that. She's in the middle of divorcing her husband, who is in the house, and producing what she hopes will become another monumental work. And now she's being called irrelevant?

Chitterling Heights world-premieres at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Women's Theatre Project (Sixth Star Studio, 505 NW First Ave., Fort Lauderdale). Tickets cost $25, or $15 for students. Runs through August 28. Call 954-462-2334, or visit womenstheatreproject.com.
Thursdays-Sundays. Starts: Aug. 4. Continues through Aug. 28, 2011