"julie harris and ethel waters in the member of the wedding"

“I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life. If Julie hadn't brought such warmth and love into the part of Frankie, all the directors and writers in the world couldn't have made me love her the way I do in the play.”      -- Ethel Waters

Carson McCullers, adapting her novel of the same name, wrote that it’s "one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise.” The play concerns a 12-year-old alienated tomboy whose closest friends are the family’s African American maid and her six-year-old cousin. When the play opened, it was hailed as “all art of a fresh and sensitive quality.” Despite Julie’s outstanding reviews, she still felt insecure. Ethel Waters would say to her, “Sugar, you just need faith.”

On the road to Broadway, The Member of the Wedding played at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, the oldest operating theater in the United States. A Philadelphia critic wrote, “Last night at the Walnut Julie Harris more than fulfilled all that her ardent admirers had expected. Her Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding is the most exciting performance of several seasons. Actually a young woman of 24, she becomes a child of 12 down to the smallest detail.” On Broadway, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Getting under the surface of the character, the performance illuminates her from within. Add to the intelligent planning of Miss Harris’ performance a touch of personal genius for acting, and there you have the measure of her contribution to the 1950 theater.” During the post-Broadway tour, Boston’s distinguished critic Elliot Norton wrote: “More spectacular and equally remarkable is the acting of Julie Harris, a young woman of 24, who plays with perfect fidelity the part of the 12-year-old girl, Frankie Addams. Her hair cropped like a boy’s, dressed haphazardly, her Frankie is an alert, eager, scatter-brained romantic, resenting the drabness of her surroundings, reaching out for love and beauty, at once fierce and tender, a confused child on the dizzy precipice of adolescence.”

Years after appearing in The Member of the Wedding, Julie recalled, “I think of how it felt standing on the stage at the curtain call, holding the hands of Brandon deWilde and Ethel Waters and hearing a sort of roar, which I’d never heard before. A roar as if the three of us were standing on the edge of the ocean and the waves were roaring, and I thought, ‘What is that noise?”