Tightwire

Book and Lyrics by Ann E. Eskridge, Music generated by AI

Sidney Monroe Trent, a young Black Vietnam vet, is on the run—hunted by Southern law enforcement and the Klan for a murder he may not have committed. Detroit offers a brief refuge, but survival forces him to flee to Canada and then Cuba, where he expects solidarity but finds suspicion. Now walking a tightwire between two countries, Sidney must fight to define freedom on his own terms.

Longer Synopsis:

In 1970, Sidney Monroe Trent, a 22-year-old Black Vietnam veteran, is running for his life. A deadly encounter with a white mob in  South Carolina has made him a fugitive, wanted by both law enforcement and the Klan. With nowhere to turn, he heads to Detroit, where the Black radical movement offers him shelter—but not safety. When the heat gets too intense, Sidney flees to Canada, then makes a desperate leap to Cuba, believing he’ll be welcomed as a comrade in the revolution.

But Cuba is not the sanctuary he imagined. Instead of brotherhood, he is met with suspicion, and imprisonment. Trapped between two worlds that reject him, Sidney grapples with his identity, his past, and the meaning of freedom.

Through betrayals, unlikely alliances, and hard-won lessons, Tightwire explores one man’s journey through exile and revolution. When given the choice—stay in Cuba or risk returning home—Sidney must decide whether freedom is a place, a right, or something he must create for himself.

Ann E. Eskridge is a 2021 Kresge Fellow in playwriting, a 2013 Black Metropolitan Research Consortium Fellow and a Fulbright Hays Group Project Abroad participant in Brazil.  She is a cross-genre writer. She written on subjects like the Underground Railroad, all-black towns in Oklahoma, New Orleans’ free people of color, the Gullah community on the Sea Islands, and Chicago’s black Tin Pan Alley through her plays, musicals, and novels. She currently is a member of Theatre Now New York, International Musical Writers Workshop.

A screenplay she wrote became a PBS Wonderworks movie, Brother Future, which won several awards. Her book and play, The Sanctuary, Cobblehill, 1994, was optioned by Producer Bill Blinn (Fame), and Sundance. Two monologues from the play are included in Childsplay; an anthology of children’s play monologues. The Sanctuary was also the basis for a children’s grief and bereavement program in Detroit. She is has written four musicals: Satin Doll, a re-interpretation of Pygmalion from a black perspective, Echoes Across the Prairie, about the founding of a fictional all-black town in Oklahoma, and The Boundaries of Freedom: A Seach for Home,  a musical about an African American civil rights activist, exiled in Cuba.  Her play with music: If Pekin is a Duck, Why am I in Chicago?, is about the first black musical theater in the country: The Pekin.  It had its World Premiere January 2023, at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis, Tenn, and was nominated as Best Original Play for the 2022-2023 season. Her short musical, The Chicken Never Crossed about a small black business along with others was destroyed because of urban renewal in Detroit was a finalist in the Obsidian Black Theatre Festival.

Her children’s plays: The Sanctuary and Bug and Junior were finalist in 2022 and 2024, in the Growing Stages Theatre in New Jersey.   In 2024, her play, A Home for Christmas won first place in the Community Theatre Association of Michigan playwriting contest.