MILK OF PARADISE: two-act play produced by the Women's Project and Productions in New York City, Julia Miles, Artistic director; published in "Playwriting Women: 7 Plays from the Women's Project", with authors' introductions, Heinemann, 325 pages, $17.95 paperback.

Scene: a large house in the south. The single set includes both interior and exterior spaces. Time: two days in June 1937. Cast: nine: a boy and a girl, two adult males, five adult females, three of them black.

From the author's introduction:

The light that shines over and through this play is the same benign late winter light that shone in the little study in the new suburb where I wrote it, in a brief, happy, three-week period. I was newly returned to Kentucky, the state of my birth.

Going home meant going back to memories buried for forty years; it also meant a new love affair with the life of the imagination, without which a play about childhood could never be written. For nothing, of course, "happened" in my life as it happens in this play. Characters and events were transformed through that act of imagination that makes the past simple and bright as in fact it never was, or could be.