Recent Press about Isaac Rathbone's New Play, "Little Eva"

Play Reexplores Eva Coo Crime 75 Years Later
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Production Planned In Milford
On Hooker With Heart Of Flint

By JIM KEVLIN

Eva Coo lives, and not only in the picture of her victim, Harry Wright, on the label of Cooperstown Brewing Co.’s Back Yard India Pale Ale. (He’s the one with an X above his head.) “I fell one of her victims,” Niles Eggleston, 92, author of “Eva Coo, Murderess,” said the other day in explaining his fascination. “But at least I’m still alive.”

If so, then Eva Coo’s latest “victim” is Isaac Rathbone, a New York City playwright raised in Milford (Harry Wright’s hometown), who will be staging a play at the Upper Susquehanna Cultural Center this June 2009.

It will mark the 75th anniversary of a crime that, thanks to New York City’s then-flourishing tabloid press, electrified Otsego County, the state and nation.
After a three-ring trial in Cooperstown, Eva Coo, on June 27, 1935, at Sing Sing, became the last woman executed by electric chair in New York State. A WGY announcer broke in and the news was signaled around the world via a relatively new medium, radio.

“Eva’s a wonderful character. She’s deviant. She’s funny. She’s great to watch,” said Rathbone the other day from his Brooklyn apartment.

“The bulk of story takes place during the Great Depression,” he said. “The play explores the desperation and survival that people went through during that time. Eva was so desperate and willing to commit a heinous crime for economic survival.
“It rings true a little bit today, to see how low people can go.”

SEE THE REST OF THE NEWS ARTICLE (click here) ON THE HOMETOWN ONEONTA WEBSITE

Labels: 01-16-09, Front Page
posted by The Freeman's Journal