Speed Killed My Cousin

The subject matter was close at hand for playwright Linda Parris-Bailey, executive/artistic director of Knoxville’s Carpetbag Theatre. “The cousin in the title of the play was a cousin of mine,” she said in a 2016 interview. “All of my cousins were going off to war.” But when Parris-Bailey’s eldest cousin returned, he subsequently died in a car crash—one she believes was caused by his post-traumatic stress disorder. In Speed Killed My Cousin, on a tour celebrating Carpetbag’s fiftieth anniversary, PTSD is also getting the best of Debra White, a young female African-American soldier just back from Iraq. As she drives her Hummer down the Long Island Expressway, she’s debating whether to let go of the steering wheel. But before deciding, she needs to talk to her father about his wartime experiences. Plus her cousin, Lynnell, wants in on the conversation, too. He’s in her rearview mirror—despite the fact he died, decades earlier, after returning from Vietnam. So are the women she thought she left behind in Iraq—backseat drivers who may or may not save this woman’s life. —Byron Woods