Franketyèn's 1978 play Pèlin-tèt puts two Haitian men in a New York basement: Piram, penniless and speaking only Kreyòl, and Polidò, a francophone trading on his learning. Past reads their cramped quarrel as a compressed account of what displacement does to Haitians, with the United States serving both as a literal room and as a figure for the political and economic pressures that drove them out in the first place.

Writing in Kreyòl rather than French, and for the stage rather than the page, Franketyèn made his work reachable by audiences excluded from literary culture, and did so while remaining in the country under Duvalier. Past notes how little criticism the play has drawn beside his novels, and argues that it refuses the stock images of Haitian helplessness that resurfaced in coverage of the 2010 earthquake, pressing instead for solidarity across the diaspora.