Ragged Dick

Journalist Dick Hunter sets out to document the slums of 1890's New York where he discovers harrowing conditions of poverty and abuse. "Neal Bell's play RAGGED DICK is a lurid, poetic and often fascinating study of sex, politics and poverty. ...Bell's landscape painting of urban poverty does not take the form of any ordinary docudrama. Rather, it offers a caustic, stylized impressionistic vision--a kind of film noir for the pre-ragtime era reminiscent of novelist E L Doctorow's work... In RAGGED DICK, Bell looks straight in the eye of everything that can breed in a slum: venereal disease, ravaged babies, corrupt and brutal cops, child abuse, warped sex and shattered souls of all descriptions. And he describes it all in startlingly original terms." Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times