A Good Man is Hard to Find

A family trip from Georgia to Florida…what could go wrong?

Find out in A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, a Reader’s Theatre Performance, adapted by Betsy Ballard from the short story by Flannery O’Connor.

In A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, a family from Atlanta—father, mother, infant, two children, and the father’s mother— set out on a vacation to Florida, but Grandmother reroutes them so she can see relatives in Tennessee instead. The family is aware that a convict called The Misfit has escaped from prison and is headed toward Florida. Thanks to the Grandmother’s interference, the family does indeed meet up with the convict and his sketchy companions, and lives are irretrievably altered. O’Connor’s macabre classic challenges our notions of goodness and grace, hypocrisy and delusion, and the possibility of redemption.

The three Narrators of the story also read multiple characters: Jane Gibbons is also Bailey’s Wife/The Children’s Mother, and Mrs. Red Sammy Butts; Terry Veal voices 8-year-old John Wesley, Bailey the Father, Red Sammy Butts, and ne’er-do-wells Hiram and Bobby Lee; Sheryl Martin is also 7-year-old June Star. Betsy Ballard voices the Grandmother, and Mark Loftis is The Misfit.

Betsy Ballard directs A Good Man is Hard to Find. This is Ballard’s third reader’s theatre script to be produced by Oklahoma StoryWorks. “Betsy also gave us adaptations of Poe’s The Premature Burial, and her own novel, Madsy Dugan Her Book,” said Sheryl Martin, Executive and Artistic Director of Oklahoma StoryWorks.