Flame in the Streets

Set at the beginning of the Civil War, Tap Roots is all about a county in Mississippi which chooses to secede from the state rather than enter the conflict. The county is protected from the Confederacy by an abolitionist and a Native American gentleman. The abolitionist's daughter is courted by a powerful newspaper publisher when her fiance, a confederate officer, elopes with the girl's sister. The daughter at first resists the publisher's attentions, but turns to him for aid when her ex-fiance plans to capture the seceding county on behalf of the South.

A gallery of characters in Brooklyn in the 1950s are crushed by their surroundings and selves: a union strike leader discovers he is gay; a prostitute falls in love with one of her clients; a family cannot cope with the fact that their daughter is illegitimately pregnant.

A young and impatient stockbroker is willing to do anything to get to the top, including trading on illegal inside information taken through a ruthless and greedy corporate raider whom takes the youth under his wing.

Terry Malloy is a kindhearted dockworker, and former boxer, who is tricked by his corrupt bosses into leading his friend to death. After falling in love, he tries to leave the waterfront and expose his employers.

Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.

In 1969, an administrator runs against the corrupt president of the United Coal Miners Union, and becomes the target of a murder plot.

Two coworkers decide to blackmail the corrupt demolition company they work for by setting up a fake accident.

Alí and José María, friends on a work trip in an old Volkswagen, get stranded in a village and make friends, but they discover that their job could alter the fate of the place.

Norma Rae is a southern textile worker employed in a factory with intolerable working conditions. This concern about the situation gives her the gumption to be the key associate to a visiting labor union organizer. Together, they undertake the difficult, and possibly dangerous, struggle to unionize her factory.

Mary Surratt is the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination trial of Abraham Lincoln. As the whole nation turns against her, she is forced to rely on her reluctant lawyer to uncover the truth and save her life.

A naïve and "nice" West Indian's descent into postcolonial cynicism is depicted in a twenty minute monologue from writer Farrukh Dhondy.