Ends is the story of Kingsley, a 26-year-old African American man who lives alone in a cabin in the wilderness. Kingsley is discovered during a thunderstorm by a white camper named Frank Glober, who has recently returned from an early tour of duty in Vietnam and is stuck in a workaday office job. Kingsley, who hasn’t seen anyone for 14 years, has gained all his knowledge about life from reading authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, subsequently naming all the objects in his cabin after characters in black history. Glober’s experience, Alex says, is more earthy. “Glober,” he says, “is global.”
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Alex has just started work on a new play, which he says is set in 600 BC, “during the Babylonian captivity.” He has written a number of other plays, including River and Sky, which received its world premiere at Hoffman Estates High School, and On to Infinity, about a mathematician and long-distance runner who, while searching for the secrets of the universe, falls in love with a dying English teacher. He swears the play’s not autobiographical.
The subject of Alex himself will often come up in class. “Sometimes my kids give me a hard time about my clothes, because they’re somewhat old-fashioned,” he says. “But I’ll tell them, look, plaids are coming back, bell-bottoms are coming back, what goes around comes around, right?”
A boy wearing a letter jacket approaches Alex and points at the ceiling. “That music, Mr. Alex,” he says, “that’s Paul Robeson singing, isn’t it?”
