“Though I've lived in the city the several years, I still yearn for the small town because that's where my youth occurred. That's where this show comes from, the view that small town values are a lot more coherent --- that our values in America are basically agrarian and that we haven't yet learned to adapt them to urban life.”-John O’Neal-
In You Can't Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover Junebug is still the narrator of stories, this time mostly about others, especially "Phillip Anthony Tatum, called ‘Po’ Tatum, because he liked to eat spuds". We follow Po's story from early boyhood in Pike County, Miss., to what seem to be his last desperate hours on earth, in a westside Chicago building. It is clear that Po is a symbol of many black youths who move from their rural, southern homes to the hard northern cities. It is a tale told with lots of humor and turn-of-phrase wisdom that in the end offers the audience serious and thought-provoking issues.
