"Garden Club" Play Has Roots in Kosciusko

by Nancy Green, The Star-Herald

The world premiere of “The Attala County Garden Club” will be March 3 in Onstage Atlanta’s O2 Theatre.The play is the latest project of Atlanta playwright and columnist Topher Payne, son of Cleve and Sheryl Payne.
“Attala County” is a personal milestone for Payne, as it marks the first play he has set in his home state.“Not just in my home state,” said Payne. “It’s my hometown of Kosciusko, during the period I was growing up there. The story surrounds the experiences I think everyone has living in a small, close-knit community. You want to stand out as an individual, and know your own value, but you also want the comfort of acceptance, fitting in. And that can create some conflict.”

The play, a comedy directed by Jeanette Stinson, tells the tale of a young woman in the 1980s who joins a group of local gardening enthusiasts, then begins to suspect that she has signed up for more than she thought.
Payne is also the author of the comedies “Beached Wails,” “Relations Unknown” and “Bad Mama.”The director describes the play as “Steel Magnolias meets Rosemary’s Baby.”

“That’s the strength of Topher’s writing. There’s some complex issues presented in the story about race, isolation and the fear of people and things we don’t understand. And he addresses all of that while keeping the audience laughing, which I think is the best way to get people to listen,” said Stinson.

"My mother’s only concern was that I don’t use real names. I told her she’d have to wait and see,” said Payne.

Payne attended Kosciusko schools, The Taft School in Connecticut and The Idyllwild Arts Academy in California.His humor column, “Maybe It’s Just Me,” appears weekly in David Magazine distributed in metro areas throughout the Southeast.His plays have been produced throughout the United States, including New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles.