Photo of Gesel Mason in Donald McKayle's "Saturday's Child" balanced on one leg

Donald McKayle’s Saturday’s Child features Mason speaking a cadenced, rhyming poem by Countee Cullen as she limps down stage in tattered flannel shirt and ragged pants. The lament of an impoverished birth and deprived childhood is realized both in the words of the poem and in the physical movements: a broken body, huddled over, struggling to balance and make a stand.