Everybody should be required to see "His Eye Is On The Sparrow" currently running at Theater in the Square in Marietta. Of course, everybody in this country can’t get into the Theater in the Square before the play finishes its run at the end of May, but maybe the people in charge could extend its stay for a few decades or so.

It is that good.

The play is about the late Ethel Waters, a blues singer and fine actress who finished out her career singing on the Billy Graham Crusades in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. But it is more than that. It is about race relations and what kind of world this would be if there were more Ethel Waters and Billy Grahams operating in this world today.

According to the play by Larry Parr, Ethel Waters grew up illegitimate, angry and poor in one of Philadephia’s worst areas and confronted racism in her unrelenting drive to the top of the business that makes you wonder how civilized a nation we really were back then. (She showed up for a performance in Macon and a young black boy was lynched and left in the theater lobby where she was to play.)

This understandably led her to mistrust all whites to the point where she saw every white person as racist thus, turning into a racist herself.

Enter Billy Graham who began encouraging her to sing at his crusades. (One can only wonder how many lives this great man has impacted in his career.) Waters resisted until she woke up one day and found she didn’t like any-thing about herself anymore. Graham convinced her that the color of one’s skin didn’t matter to him and certainly didn’t matter to God.

What made the performance so remarkable to me — besides an electric performance by Atlanta Bernadine Mitchell and an exceptional pianist named Renee Clark — was seeing blacks and whites interspersed throughout the theater laughing at the same lines and chatting wih each other during the intermission. We had all found common ground for a brief couple of hours. We had all been reminded that it is not the color of our skin that is important, it is the fact that we are all God’s people— black adn white.

We all left the theater — some wiping away tears — and no doubt will quickly fall back into our routines of look-ing at each other with suspicion and complain about the other’s racism, sometimes with justification.

But for a couple of magic hours, we were all one group of Americans enjoying something in common — a dyna-mite play.

It should be required viewing by everybody in the land.. We would all be better for it.