Anthologies
Adrienne Kennedy in One Act
by Adrienne Kennedy

“Since her earliest plays…[Adrienne Kennedy] has been creating frightful and seductive theatrical images of her memories and fantasies. Her black, female protagonists enact Kennedy’s nightmares, then make them ours, enveloping the audience in their relentless anger, madness, and fear…time and place shift constantly, plot lines are parceled out in bits, and a contextual frame comes clear gradually, like a reflection in stilling waters.” -Alisa Solomon, Village Voice

Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press (September 1, 1988)

Paperback:
171 pages
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America Play and Other Works, The
by Suzan-Lori Parks

A dense yet haunting personal vision. Surrealistic sideshow, troubled dream, poetic riff on black identity… If you expect plays to deliver tidy meanings, you should probably steer clear. If, however, you like the freedom to wonder (and wander) about works of art, if the space between words intrigues you as much as the words themselves, then The America Play is definitely worthy of concentrated attention.
-David Richards, New York Times

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group (December 1, 1995)

Paperback:
224 pages
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Beauty's Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick
by Dael Orlandersmith

The sheer exuberance of language that pours forth in Dael Orlandersmith’s plays has dazzled critics and audiences alike. In this collection of three of her words, the award-winning writer and performer celebrates the power of words to rescue from their constricted worlds the young black women she portrays. In Beauty’s Daughter tough-taking Diane years to free herself from the soul-deadening netherworld of her ghetto neighborhood. In Monster, Theresa imagines a life among her idols in the rock-‘n’roll poetry bohemia of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and away from her home in East Harlem. In The Gimmick, young Alexis finds refuge from the brutal reality of the streets among the library bookshelves, where she dreams of becoming an American writer in Paris like James Baldwin. Charged with fearless wisdom, these three searing, electrifying plays transform rage-filled ghetto experience into a triumph of rhapsodic language.

Publisher:
Vintage; 1st edition (October 17, 2000)

Paperback:
128 pages
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Black Drama Anthology
by Woodie King (Editor), Ron Milner (Editor)

An exciting new generation of black playwrights has come of age in a startling short time. Suddenly the boundaries between stage and life have been dissolved by writers determined to tell what it is and what it means to be black in the here and now of America as no white has every really known it. The twenty-three plays in this collection vary enormously in mood, method, and mode of attack. There is harsh realism, high and low comedy, surreal displacement of time, place, and personality, using original techniques that compare with jazz in their innovative power. All, however, have their foundations firmly rooted in the uncompromising truth of the black experience. And all are among the most explosive works of theater being written today.

Publisher:
New American Library (1971)
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Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company
by Paul Carter Harrison (Editor), Gus Edwards (Editor)

This anthology celebrates more than twenty-five years of the Negro Ensemble Company’s significant contribution to American theater. Collected here are ten plays most representative of the eclectic nature of the Negro Ensemble Company repertoire.

The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) was formed in New York City in 1967 with support from the Ford Foundation to aid in the establishment of an independent African-American theater institution. Under the artistic directorship of Douglas Turner Ward, the NEC offered a nurturing environment to black playwrights and actors who could work autonomously, guaranteeing authenticity of voice, full freedom of expression, and exploration of thematic views specific to the African-American experience.

Since its inception, the NEC has introduced audiences to more than 150 theatrical works. Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company allows scholars and practitioners an opportunity to review a diversity of styles which share common philosophical, mythic, and social ideals that can be traced to an African worldview. A foreword by Douglas Turner Ward and an afterword by Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards assess the literary and/or stylistic significance of the plays and place each work in its historical or chronological context.

Publisher:
University of Pittsburgh Press (September 1, 1995)

Paperback:
594 pages
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Collected Plays 2
by Wole Soyinka

The ironic development and consequences of ‘progress’ may be traced through both the themes and the tone of the works included in this second volume of Wole Soyinka’s plays. The Lion and the Jewel shows an ineffectual assault on past tradition soundly defeated. In Kongi’s Harvest, however, the pretensions of Kongi’s regime are also fatal. The denouement points the way forward. The two Brother Jero plays pursue that way, the comic ‘propheteering’ of the earlier play giving way to the sardonic reality of Jero’s Metamorphosis. Madmen and Specialists, Soyinka’s most pessimistic play, concerns the physical, mental, and moral destruction of modern civil war.

Publisher:
Oxford University Press (January 1, 1975)

Paperback:
282 pages
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Dictation: Expresso Café, What A Man's Gotta Do, Greased, Fried & Laid To The Side
by LaRita Shelby

An extraordinary text that fills the void for all actors of color. Finally, a book of monologues, poems and plays worthy to use for auditions as well as showcase productions.
-Juney Smith, Drama Instructor, High School of Performing Arts, NYC President of Mattie Films

It’s a performers dream. The work reads like personal confessions extracted from your very own soul. You see, feel and hear these words as if they are your own.
-S. Torriano Berry, Professor of Film, Howard University, Co-author of “The 50 Most Influential Black Films”

A unique, humorous passionate and spiritual collection of “run away feelings” captured in a format that will be well received by all who are blessed with Soul.
-Erma Clanton, Emeritus Professor, University of Memphis, Founder & Director of Evening of Soul

Publisher:
Sea To Sun Books

Paperback:
110 pages
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Dutchman and The Slave
by Leroi Jones

Centered squarely on the Negro-white conflict, both Dutchman and The Slave are literally shocking plays-in ideas, in language, in honest anger. They illuminate as with a flash of lightning a deadly serious problem-and they bring an eloquent and exceptionally powerful voice to the American theatre.

Dutchman opened in New York City on March 24, 1964, to perhaps the most excited acclaim ever accorded an off-Broadway production and shortly thereafter received the Village Voice’s Obie Award. The Slave, which was produced off-Broadway the following fall, continues to be the subject of heated critical controversy.

Publisher:
Perennial (June 1, 1964)

Paperback:
96 pages
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Faces of African Independence:
Three Plays (Caraf Books)
by Guillaume Oyono-Mbia, Guillaume Trois Pretendants, UN Mari Oyono-Mbia (Editor), Guillaume Until Further Notice Oyono-Mbia (Editor), Seydou Mort De Chaka Badian (Editor)

Serious writing in French in the Caribbean and Africa has developed unique characteristics in this century. Colonialism was its crucible; African independence in the 1960s its liberating force. The struggles of nation-building and even the constraints of neocolonialism have marked the coming of age of literatures that now gradually distance themselves from the common matrix.

CARAF Books is a collection of novels, plays, poetry, and essays, most published in English in this country for the first time. Each volume has substantial critical introduction written especially for this edition by an acclaimed scholar. This introduction sets each book in its cultural context and makes it accessible to both the student and the general reader.

Publisher:
University Press of Virginia 1988

Paperback:
127 pages
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Five Plays By Langston Hughes
by Langston Hughes, Webster Smalley (Editor)

No writer more effectively captured the spirit of Negro life in America, especially in the urban North, than Langston Hughes. The world portrayed in his drama is quite different from that of any writer, and its discovery is an entertaining, wonderful, and enlightening experience. Five plays representing Hughes’ dramatic writing over a period of forty years are here presented in paperback form for the first time. The plays are Tambourines to Glory, Soul Gone Home, Little Ham, Mulatto, and Simply Heavenly.

Publisher:
Indiana University Press (June 1, 1963)

Paperback:
280 pages
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Fire This Time : African-American Plays for the 21st Century, The
by Jr., Harry Elam (Editor), Robert Alexander (Editor)

This major new anthology collects new work by important artists which explore the context of African-American drama in 21st century America. The plays included are:

“In the Blood” by Suzan-Lori Parks
“Civil Sex” by Brian Freeman
“The Dark Kalamazoo” by Oni Lampley
King Hedley II by August Wilson
Insurrection: Holding History by Robert O’Hara
Crumbs from the Table of Joy by Lynn Nottage
A Preface to the Alien Garden by Robert Alexander
Rhyme Deferred by Kamilah Forbes and Hip Hop Theatre Junction

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group (February 15, 2002)

Paperback:
440 pages
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Flyin' West and Other Plays
by Pearl Cleage

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group; 1st ed edition (May 15, 1999)

Paperback:
339 pages
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Four Black Revolutionary Plays
by Imamu Amiri Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones) Baraka

There four one-act plays deal with the African-American experience of today. Their central elements are love and hatred echoed in violently explosive words, actions, thoughts and metaphor. The sum total of three hundred years of contained fury, they are powerful statements about the real meaning of white oppression of black people. In their militancy and anger, they perfectly express the mood and frustrations of black American and are relevant today as when they were first publicly performed. This new edition of Four Black Revolutionary Plays also includes a Foreword by playwright, novelist, journalist and lecturer Lindsay Barrett, who has also made widely acclaimed radio and TV programs on jazz, the arts and African cultural matters.

Writing originally as LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka has been both a major literary figure and a political advocate of great influence in the black community during the course of a career spanning four decades. He has written fiction, essays, poetry, an autobiography and plays, one of which, Dutchman, won him an Obie for Best American Play and was later made into a feature film. Both a Whitney and a Guggenheim fellow, he is a scholar of Yoruba Academy and is currently Professor and Chair of African American Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Publisher:
Marion Boyars Publishers (June 1, 1997)

Paperback:
105 pages
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Latins Anonymous
by Latins Anonymous, Rick Najera, Edward James Olmos, Cris Franco

Nothing is sacred in the satire of Latins Anonymous. The hilarious Latino comedy theatre company has toured the United States poking fun at all, from political figures to Latino entertainment personalities. Formed in 1988 and performing at such mainstream venues as the Los Angeles Theater Center as well as alternatives spaces in barrios across the Southwest, Latins Anonymous has developed its own distinctive, post-modern and very irreverent style of commenting on life and culture in the U.S.

Included in this first published collection are the troupe’s signature play, Latins Anonymous, which satirizes the rejection of one’s cultural heritage and The La La Awards, in which the media are lampooned through outlandish impersonations of favorite Latino stars.

Publisher:
Arte Publico Press (October 1, 1996)

Paperback:
103 pages
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Les Blancs - The Collected Last Plays
by Lorraine Hansberry

Before her death at the tragically early age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry managed to revolutionize American drama with plays that presented black experience directly, unapologetically, and often angrily. Her work shook the complacency of white audiences even as it laid the ground for subsequent debates about racism, feminism, and African struggles for self-determination. The three plays in this volume represent the capstone of her achievement.

In Les Blancs Hansberry sets a drama of Shakespearean grandeur in the shifting moral terrain of late-colonial Africa, where her anguished hero must choose between two different kinds of loyalty and two fatally opposing codes of conduct.

Publisher:
Vintage; Reprint edition (December 13, 1994)

Paperback:
288 pages
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Plays of Black Americans
by Sylvia E. Kamerman (Editor)

Whether in the areas of politics, science, medicine, the arts, or education, black Americans have helped shape our country with their major contributions. This classic volume of plays, choral readings, and dramatic presentations, now in its forth printing, eloquently celebrates the struggles and triumphs of black leaders along the road to success.

An new play, “Arthur Ashe: Tennis Championship,” examines the life of the celebrated athlete whose exemplary sportsmanship and struggle for civil rights in all parts of the world made him a legend. Other black Americans whose lives are dramatized here are Langston Hughes, a young poet who defied his father in order to follow his dreams; George Washington Carver, whose work in agricultural research won him international acclaim; Mary McLeod Bethune, who paved the way for increased educational opportunities for blacks; and Martin Luther King, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting non-violence as a solution to racial problems. A legendary Southern folk hero comes to life in “John Henry”; and in “Abe Lincoln and the Runaways,” escaping slaves are helped along the road to freedom.

“Freedom Train” and the “The Abolition Flyer” highlight the efforts of abolitionists who led thousands of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad; and two choral readings---“Harriet Tubman---the Second Moses” and “Crispus Attucks,” honoring the first person to die during the Revolutionary War---round out the book.

The eleven dramatic episodes in this valuable book are especially suited for the celebration of Black History Month, Martin Luther King’s birthday, and as year-round reminders of our country’s rich black heritage. Offering material that will inspire as well as entertain, Plays of Black Americans is the book that teachers and drama directors will turn to time and time again to fill a wide range of program needs.

Publisher:
Plays; Expanded edition (May 1, 1994)

Paperback:
154 pages
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Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers
by Rukhsana Ahmad, Winsome Pinnock, Maya Chowdhry, Meera Syal, Trish Cooke, Zindika, Kadija George (Editor), Cheryl Robson (Editor)

The first drama by Six Black and Asian Women Writers. Comedy, poetry, history and magic combined with themes of a social and spiritual nature make this volume an exciting collection. Plays for stage, radio and television together with essays on theatre, writing workshops, oral traditions and Yvonne Brewster O.B.E. in dialogue.

Publisher:
Aurora Metro Press (April 1, 1999)

Paperback:
226 pages
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South Central Stories: Double or Nothin', The Ride, Happy Anniversary Punk!
by Mike Ajakwe, Jr.

“Double or Nothin’…humorously underscores the obstacle to dating a single woman who comes with a problem son.”
Sally Johnson, Backstage West

“Ajakwe’s perspective on the all too familiar setting of Al Cowlings leading a slow speed chase on the 405 freeway, while O.J. Simpson cowers in the back seat of a Ford Bronco, challenged my own preconceived notions. There is an irreverent ‘Pulp Fiction’ quality to the dialogue that makes for nervous laughter and introspective insight.”
-John Bantona, Hollywood Nightlife Showcase

“A very funny and superbly constructed encounter between an obsessed postal employee named Al and the 15 year old who murdered his son a year earlier.”
-Scott Collins, Los Angeles Times

Publisher:
Pipedream Press (March 31, 2001)

Paperback:
105 pages

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South Central Stories: Double or Nothin', The Ride, Happy Anniversary Punk!
Mike Ajakwe, Jr.

Best Price $12.99
The Haitian Trilogy
by Derek Walcott

In the history that compose The Haitian Trilogy---Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haitian Earth---Derek Walcott uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest, and rebellion.

In Henri Christophe (first performed in 1949) and The Haitian Earth (1984), Walcott recasts the legacy of Haiti’s violent revolutionaries---led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe---whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. Drums and Colours, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the establishment of the first West Indian Federation, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh, Toussaint, and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era.

From Henri Christophe’s high style to the bracing vernacular of The Haitian Earth to the epic scale and scope of Drums and Colours, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theatre for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.

Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 15, 2002)

Paperback:
448 pages
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The Red Letter Plays
by Suzan-Lori Parks, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Suzan-Lori Park’s extraordinary new play, in the blood, is about the way we live now, and it is truly harrowing. Ms. Parks’s writing has grown leaner and hungrier, and you will leave this play feeling pity and terror. We cannot turn away, and we do not want to. And because it is a work of art, you will leave thrilled, even comforted, by its mastery.
-Margo Jefferson, New York Times

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group; 1st ed edition (December 1, 2000)

Paperback:
224 pages
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Three Plays: The Last Carnival, A Branch of the Blue Nile, & Beef, No Chicken
by Derek Walcott

The three plays in this collection form a triptych---the central play, a farce, is flanked by two dramas. Together they span the last four decades of Trinidad’s social and political history, beginning, in The Last Carnival, with the colonial life-style of a French Creole family faced with the emergence of the Black Power movement, and ending, in A Branch of the Blue Nile, with the conflict among members of a small theatre company in contemporary Port-of-Spain. Beef, No Chicken, the middle play, deals with the corruption of a small town in a hurry to catch up with industrialization that new highway will bring.

The Last Carnival is an entirely new version of Walcott’s earlier, unpublished play, In a Fine Castle. It had its American premiere with the Group Theatre Company in Seattle in 1983. Beef, No Chicken premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre’s Winterfest series in 1982. A Branch of the Blue Nile was given its Caribbean premiere by Stage One in Barbados in 1983.

Publisher:
Farrar Straus & Giroux (July 1, 1986)

Paperback:
311 pages
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Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory
by Paul Carter Harrison (Editor)

“Word! Mother/word! Word/song!” is the starting point for Paul Carter Harrison’s rapping, railing, whispering, wailing, witnessing anthology of black plays. Harrison identifies the rhythmic, onomatopoetic, incantatory use of language in cultures as diverse as South Africa and the South Bronx as the unifying-and liberating-aesthetic principle of modern black dramaturgy.

The black theater’s thematic range, formal inventiveness, and extraordinary command of word/song are powerfully illustrated by the eight plays in this collection: The Strong Breed, by the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka; Shango de Ima, by Cuba’s Pepe Carril; Ti-Jean and His Brothers, by the great West Indian poet Derek Walcott; A New Song, by exiled South African playwright Zakes Mofokeng; Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf; Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Fuller’s Zooman and the Sign; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, by another Pulitzer Prize winner, August Wilson; and Harrison’s own Ameri/Cain Gothic.

Filled with language that laughs, sings, and signifies with an almost gestural force, these plays of joy and pain, sorrow and celebration, rage and redemption, are all proud children of Mother/word.

Publisher:
Grove Press (January, 1989)

Paperback:
523 pages
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Walker and The Ghost Dance
by Derek Walcott

Walker, first performed in 1992 and revived (in a revised version) in 2001, is named for David Walker, the nineteenth century black abolitionist from Boston who advocated violent revolt against slavery and galvanized his generation. In Walcott’s hands he is a classical hero, a political leader who is also a poet. The Ghost Dance takes place on a cold winter’s day in Dakota, when Kicking Bear brings news of a rebellion to a white widow named Catherine Weldon; when the alarm seeps into the tiny fort nearby, its mixed company splinters apart in the face of the perceived threat. First performed in 1989, it is a parable of American life at a crossroads, drawn from a story with a historical conclusion: Sitting Bull and his Sioux followers will die at the hands of the Army and Indian agents.

In Walker and The Ghost Dance, one of our greatest poets and playwrights brings to life two broken communities whose charismatic leaders would change American history.

Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (July 1, 2002)

Paperback:
144 pages
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Woza Albert
by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, Barney Simon

Based on one dazzingly simple idea - that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ should take place in present-day South Africa – this brilliant two-man show from the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, took the Edinburgh Festival then London by storm in September 1982, playing to standing ovations every night. Seen also in Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia and twice on BBC-TV, Woza Albert! is “a satire played with devastating energy in a brilliantly witty staging” (Guardian).

Publisher:
Methuen Publishing Ltd. (September 1, 2003)

Paperback
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Yellowman & My Red Hand, My Black Hand
by Dael Orlandersmith

The New York Times has called Dael Orlandersmith “an otherworldly messenger, perhaps the sorcerer’s apprentice, or a heaven-sent angel with the devil in her,” and her reputation as one of the most unique voices in contemporary American drama continues to grow.

In her play Yellowman, a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, Alma and Eugene have know each other since they were young children. As their friendship blossoms into love, Alma struggles to free herself from her mother’s poverty and alcoholism, while Eugene must contend with the legacy of being “yellow”---lighter-skinned than his brutal and unforgiving father.

This edition also includes My Red Hand, My Black Hand, in which a young woman explores her heritage as the child of a blues-loving Native American man and a black sharecropper’s daughter from Virginia. Alternately joyous and harrowing, both plays are powerful examinations of the racial tensions that fracture families, communities, and individual lives.

Publisher:
Vintage (October 8, 2002)

Paperback:
112 pages
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Zoot Suit and Other Plays
by Luis Valdez

Luis Valdez is unquestionably the outstanding figure in Hispanic theater of the United States. While his credits include outstanding achievements everywhere, from flatbed truck and conventional stages to the silver and small screens, Valdez has remained a rebel and an innovator, as well as a re-creator of Hispanic traditions.

Here are three of the most important and critically acclaimed Valdez plays. Each, in the ultimate analysis, is about a search for identity through the playwright’s quest for what is reality-past, present and future.

Publisher:
Arte Publico Press (January 1, 1992)

Paperback:
214 pages
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Comedy
Gas
by Elizabeth Kay Otero

Guillermo, a young Chicano, is searching for his place in the world now that his mother is getting married, for the first time, to an Anglo man. Guillermo demands to know the truth about his father, but his mother gives him an insufficient answer, as she has all his life. It is on the day of his mother’s wedding that Janel, a 23-year-old, half Chicana, half-Anglo woman escaping her problems at New Mexico State University, enters town. She crosses Guillermo’s path at a gas station in Las Vegas, New Mexico. With his encouragement, Janel’s car is “borrowed” by Jorge, Sammy and Crespin while Janel is paying for her gas. Guillermo becomes infatuated with Janel and gives her the runaround as to where her car really is. She, in turn, must endure Guillermo and Frank, the quirky gas station attendant. But while alone, Guillermo and Janel confront racial prejudices about each other and help each other to look beyond these differences. It is not a smooth road nor is it all serious. Along it, Guillermo and Janel have to deal with gas station cappuccino powder, a unicycle and Nutty Buddy’s Blackout Whiskey, not to mention Frank’s many anecdotes and philosophies on life.

Publisher:
Dramatic Pub Co (October 1, 2003)

Paperback
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‘Low Dat
by Jess Walters

All the boys check for Missy – a 15 year old girl, with a front and attitude – but she’s only got eyes for Panda, a 17 year old boy with a lot more experience, or so it seems. Tin Tin and D a happy to hang out on the swings and roundabouts of the local playground. That is until Tyler, a buff young Brummie, comes by dragging a Christmas tree. Jess Walter’s new comedy is about growing up, love and sex and that time in your life when the big question is when a where to ‘low dat.

Publisher:
Oberon Books (July 31, 2006)

Paperback:
126 pages
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Master Harold ... and the Boys
by Athol Fugard

“In ‘Master Harold’… and the boys the author has journeyed so deep into the psychosis of racism that all national boundaries quickly fall away, that no one is left unimplicated by his vision… Mr. Fugard has forced us to face, point-blank, our capacity for hate… but we’re also left with the exultant hope that we may yet practice compassion without stumbling… The choice, of course, is ours. Mr. Fugard’s wrenching plays, which insists that we make it, is beyond beauty.”
-Frank Rich, The New York Times

Publisher:
Penguin Books; Reprint edition (November 1, 1984)

Paperback:
60 pages
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Six Degrees of Separation
by John Guare

In this soaring and deeply provocative tragicomedy of race, class, and manners, John Guare has created the most important American play in years. Six Degrees of Separation is one of those rare works that capture both the supercharged pulse of our present era and the deepest and most mysterious movements of the human heart.

Publisher:
Vintage; Vintage edition (November 14, 1990)

Paperback:
136 pages
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South of Where We Live
by Kenneth B. Davis, Stan Peters (Editor), Michael, Jr. Ajakwe (Editor)

“[Six] highly-paid, Black professionals [arrive] at the Hyatt Regency in the San Francisco business district for a weeklong personal awareness seminar. Each brings insecurities and a huge ego to hide behind.”
- Nichelle Y. Smith, Dayton Daily News,

Nominated for 4 NAACP Theatre Awards

Publisher:
Pipedream Press (December 1, 2002)

Paperback:
153 pages

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South of Where We Live
Kenneth B. Davis, Stan Peters (Editor), Michael, Jr. Ajakwe (Editor)

Best Price $11.00




Drama
A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry

With A Raisin in the Sun, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the 1958-59 season, Lorraine Hansberry touched the taproots of black American life as never before. Since then, people from all walks of life have heralded the play for its timeless relevance to the lives of all people and have placed it among the great classics of American theater. In this edition, important lines and scenes from the original play have been restored. Now, presented in its entirety for the first time ever, this historic and extraordinary moving work represents the towering legacy of Lorraine Hansberry, a unique dramatist whose work has enriched American theater---and American life.

Publisher:
Vintage; Reprint edition (November 29, 1994)

Paperback:
160 pages
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A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign Sidney Brustein's Window
by Robert Nemiroff

By the time of her death thirty years ago, at the tragically young age of thirty-four, Lorraine Hansberry had created two electrifying masterpieces of the American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry gave this country its most movingly authentic portrayal of black family life in the inner city. Barely five years later, with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Hansberry gave us an unforgettable portrait of a man struggling with his individual fate in an age of racial and social injustice. These two plays remain milestones in the American theater, remarkable not only for their historical value but for their continued ability to engage the imagination and the heart.

Publisher:
Vintage; Reissue edition (June 13, 1995)

Paperback:
368 pages
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A Soldier's Play
by Charles Fuller

As Charles Fuller’s new play opens, a black sergeant cries out in the night, “They still hate you,” then is shot twice and falls dead. It is 1944 at Fort Neal, a segregated army camp in Louisiana, and the balance of the play tracks the investigation of the murder, which turns out to have more to do with the character of the victim than with the identity of the killer. A Soldier’s Play is more than a detective story: it is a tough, incisive exploration of racial tensions and ambiguities among blacks and between blacks and whites that gives no easy answers or blame.

Playwright Fuller must by this time be recognized as one of the contemporary American theater’s most forceful and original voices.
-Walter Kerr, The New York Times

A Soldier’s Play is a work of great resonance and integrity, bound to be one of the best American plays of this season.
-Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Charles Fuller has had three previous plays produced by the Negro Ensemble Company: Zooman and the Sign, The Brownsville Raid, and In the Deepest Part of Sleep. The NEC first produced A Soldier’s Play in November 1981. Mr. Fuller lives in Philadelphia.

Publisher:
Hill and Wang (September 1, 1982)

Paperback:
100 pages
List Price
$8.80
The Amen Corner
by James Baldwin

To his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought the messianic passion and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches where he had preached as a boy in Harlem. But The Amen Corner is also infused with a critical awareness of the price that church demanded from its worshippers – even at it gave them a refuge from a world where black lives counted for nothing.

For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when her estranged husband, Luke, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path. The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between men and women and fathers and sons. It is a scalding, uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater.

Publisher:
Vintage; Reprint edition (February 17, 1998)

Paperback:
112 pages
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Angelique
by Lorena Gale

A rich, poetic evocation of a graceful yet cruel time---a time when “civilized” citizens still bought and sold slaves. This is a time when the thoughts and feelings of these captive people had no bearing on the outcome of their lives, unless they were outraged and brave enough to try and shake their bonds. Angelique is the winner of the du Maurier National Playwriting Competition and was nominated Outstanding New Play in Calgary’s Betty Mitchell Awards, 1998.

Publisher:
Playwrights Canada Press; 1st ed edition (September 1, 2000)

Paperback:
96 pages
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Blues For Mister Charlie
by James Baldwin

In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of violence--which is loosely based on the notorious 1955 killing of Emmett Till--James Baldwin launches an unsparing and at times agonizing probe of the wounds of race. For where once a white storekeeper could have shot a "boy" like Richard Henry with impunity, times have changed. And centuries of brutality and fear, patronage and contempt, are about to erupt in a moment of truth as devastating as a shotgun blast.

Publisher:
Vintage; Reprint edition (April 25, 1995)

Paperback:
144 pages
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Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
by Lonne Elder III

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, a classic of American theater, is the poignant story of a family in 1950s Harlem. In timeless prose, Lonne Elder explores the discontent of a generation that has grown old before its time, and the determination of the next generation to avoid such a fate. In the play, Russell B. Parker is a prodigal father and failed barber who exists on memories and “ceremonies” for survival. He spends his time recounting atmospheric tales of his life in vaudeville and tells, in darkly comic detail, about his days on the chain gang. Just beneath the surface of Elder’s work lie the terrors of day-to-day life in a racist society – never directly mentioned, but always simmering unforgettably.

Ceremonies in Dark Old Men had its debut Off-Broadway in 1969. It received enthusiastic reviews and moved into an extended run. Since its first performance, the play has been produced numerous times both on television and on the stage, with the leads being played by an honor roll of actors, including Laurence Fishburne, Denzel Washington, and Billy Dee Williams.

Publisher:
Noonday Press (June 1, 1997)

Paperback:
179 pages
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Company Policy: The Rage Behind The Mask
by Michael Ajakwe, Jr.

An all-white insurance firm, looking to diversify its staff, hires two African-Americans---a male and a female---even though it can only afford to keep on. Who will survive probation, and at what cost?

“An African-American Glenngarry, Glenn Ross!”
-Richard Stayton, Los Angeles Times

Publisher:
Pipedream Press; 2nd edition (March 31, 2001)

Paperback:
93 pages

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Company Policy: The Rage Behind The Mask
Mike Ajakwe, Jr.

Best Price $9.99
Darker Face Of The Earth, The
by Rita Dove

The Darker Face of the Earth, the first full-length play by Rita Dove, is a classical tragedy based on the story of Oedipus and set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina.

This completely revised second edition coincides with 1996 world premier at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Dramatic readings of The Darker Face of the Earth were initially staged on Broadway.

“Poet Laureate Dove has done an amazing thing… her placement of the tale of Oedipus within the context of slavery and its open secret of miscegenation is brilliant, potent, and repercussive.”
-Booklist

Publisher:
Story Line Pr; Completely rev. 2nd ed edition (July 1, 1996)

Paperback:
162 pages
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Death and the King's Horseman
by Wole Soyinka

A Nobel Prize-winning playwright's classic tale of tragic decisions in a traditional African culture. Based on events that took place in Oyo, an ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946, Wole Soyinka's powerful play concerns the intertwined lives of Elesin Oba, the king's chief horseman; his son, Olunde, now studying medicine in England; and Simon Pilkings, the colonial district officer. The king has died and Elesin, his chief horseman, is expected by law and custom to commit suicide and accompany his ruler to heaven. The stage is set for a dramatic climax when Pilkings learns of the ritual and decides to intervene and Elesin's son arrives home.

Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company (April 1, 2002)

Paperback:
77 pages
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Driving Miss Daisy
by Alfred Uhry

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group; 1st edition (June 1, 1988)

Paperback:
51 pages
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Fences
by August Wilson

The author of the 1984-85 Broadway season’s best play, MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM, returns with another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him new critical acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of FENCES, Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be---to survive. For Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But now the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s… a spirit that his changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can…a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less…

Publisher:
Plume Books; Reissue edition (March 1, 1995)

Paperback:
101 pages
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Great White Hope, The
by Howard Sackler

Publisher:
Faber and Faber Ltd (December 31, 1971)

Paperback:
80 pages
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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
by Ntozake Shange

From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award-winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975 when it was praised by The New Yorker for encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.,

Publisher:
Scribner; Reprint edition (September 1, 1997)

Paperback:
80 pages
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Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom
by Suzan-Lori Parks

Publisher:
Sun and Moon Press; Reissue edition (September 1, 1995)

Paperback:
68 pages
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In the Freedom of Dreams : The Story of Nelson Mandela
by Michael Miller

Dreams guide you, delude you, and sometimes the belief in a dream can set a man and a nation free.

In the Freedom of Dreams, The Story of Nelson Mandela is more than just a play about this great man’s fight against deplorable injustice. It’s about the power of a collective vision of humanity that can change the world. Through words, stories, music, and dance, the play explores the vivid world of Rolihlahla Nelson Madiba Mandela’s childhood in the village of Qunu. It takes us to the rough and tumble world of Johannesburg in the years before World War II, the harshness of the Robben Island prison and finally to the corridors of power.

The play not only illuminates Mandela’s public role as a freedom fighter for his people, it speaks about his love affair with justice and to the cause, and how this affair of the heart affected the dreams of the people around as a father, son, husband, and brother.

In the Freedom of Dreams, The Story of Nelson Mandela is a play about a little boy whose only dream was to become the stick-fighting champion of his village and how the forces of history created circumstances and hardships that forced him to make his personal dreams for himself grow into the dreams of a nation and the world.

Publisher:
Playwrights Canada Press (September 15, 2005)

Paperback:
96 pages
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Jitney
by August Wilson

A thoroughly revised version of a play August Wilson first wrote in 1979, Jitney was produced in New York for the first time in the spring of 2000, winning rave reviews and the accolade of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year. Set in the 1970s in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, and depicting gypsy cabdrivers who serve black neighborhoods, Jitney is the seventh in Wilson’s projected ten-play cycle (one for each decade) on the black experience in the twentieth century America. He writes not about historical events or the pathologies of the black community, but, as he says, about “the unique particulars of black culture… I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us…through profound moments in our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.”

Publisher:
Overlook TP (January 15, 2003)

Paperback:
96 pages
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Joe Turner's Come and Gone
by August Wilson

When Herald Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years’ impressed labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang, he is a free man---in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents his old gins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world---and it will take more than skills of the local “People Finder” to discover it…
<-BR> Publisher:
Plume Books; Reissue edition (October 1, 1992)

Paperback:
94 pages
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King Hedley II
by August Wilson

Set in 1985 in two tenement backyards in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, King Hedley II continues playwright August Wilson’s monumental cycle of plays chronicling African American Life in twentieth century America. And epic tragedy of the common man and the crushing weight of everyday life and our ultimate struggle to regain our sense of community and culture in a crumbling urban society.

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group (May 15, 2005)

Paperback:
128 pages
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Last Shine, The
by Arthur J. Graham


All of the action takes place in Hambone Jones’s show shine parlor, and partly in Zac Taylor’s barber shop adjacent to the shine parlor. Hambone first appears as a fifteen-year-old boy, short for his age but stocky. The town is a small community of 3,000 people and is located two hundred miles south of Chicago. Hambone has one sustaining desire which is to give the best shine he knows how, his “humming-bird special,” along with spirited conversation.

Toward the end of his long service, Hambone begins to feel an impending loss of worth, as to the value of his shine service, which is brought on by the persons and circumstances surrounding a new synthetic leather product. Fearful of his service becoming obsolete, Hambone fortifies himself with the courage to continue shining, by reaffirming his belief that he could shine shoes indefinitely.

Because of this spirited believe, Hambone places his hope and trust in his white patronizers, who Hambone feels will support his kind of work. But later, Hambone is confronted with a choice either to continue his illusive service or to face up to a challenging situation of human conflict out of which the truth of his life, his worth, and his black identity must ultimately evolve.

Finally, while contesting the veracity of a black customer, Hambone renders his “last shine” which becomes a vengeful act of paradoxical self-destruction. Hambone, thus, is to vent his frustrations which result from his dawning awareness of his ostensible importance and security.
-Prelude

Publisher:
KImberly Press 1969

Paperback:
49 pages
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Lion And The Jewel, The
by Wole Soyinka

This is one of the best-known plays by Africa’s major dramatist, Wole Soyinka. It is set in the Yoruba village of Ilunjinle. The main characters are Sidi (the Jewel), a true village belle’ and Baroka (the Lion), the crafty and powerful Bale of the village, Lakunle, the young teacher, influenced by western ways, and Sadiku, the eldest of Baroka’s wives. How the Lion hunts the Jewel is the theme of this ribald comedy.

Publisher:
Oxford University Press; New Ed edition (June 1, 1963)

Paperback:
72 pages
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M Butterfly
by David Henry Hwang

Based upon a true story that stunned the world, M. Butterfly opens in the cramped prison cell where diplomat Rene Gallimard is being held captive by the French government – and by his own illusions. In the darkness of his cell he recalls a time when desire seemed to give him wings. A time when Song Liling, the beautiful Chinese diva, touched him with a love as vivid, as seductive – and as elusive – as a butterfly.

How could he have know, then, that his ideal woman was, in fact, a spy for the Chinese government – and a man disguised as a woman? In a series of flashbacks, the diplomat relives the 20-year affair from the temptation to the seduction, from its consummation to the scandal that ultimately consumed them both. But, at the end, there can only be one answer: For whether or not Gallimard’s passion was a flight of fancy, it has touched off the most vigorous emotions of his life.

Only in real life could love become so unreal. And only in such a dramatic tour de force do we learn how a fantasy can become a man’s mistress – as well as his jailer. M. Butterfly is one of the most compelling, explosive, and slyly humorous dramas ever to light the Broadway stage, a work of unrivaled brilliance, illuminating the conflict between men and women, the differences between East and West, racial stereotypes – and the shadows we cast around our most cherished illusions.

Publisher:
Plume Books (February 1, 1994)

Paperback:
100 pages
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Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: A Play in Two Acts
by August Wilson

The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is more than music. It is a riveting portrayal of black rage…of racism, of the self-hate that racism breeds, and of racial exploitation…

Publisher:
Plume Books; Reissue edition (March 1, 1988)

Paperback:
112 pages
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Madmen and Specialists
by Wole Soyinka

Publisher:
Methuen Publishing Ltd. (September 1, 2003)

Paperback
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No Place to Be Somebody
by Charles Gordone

“Here is a black panther of a play. ‘No Place to Be Somebody’ stalks the off-Broadway stage as if it were an urban jungle, snarling and clawing with uninhibited fury at the contemporary fabric of black-white and black-black relationships.

“Gordone is too honest to lie about a bright tomorrow, but in thunder and in laughter he tells the racial truth about today.”
-Time

Publisher:
Bobbs-Merrill (1969)

Paperback:
115 pages
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North Star
by Gloria Bond Clunie

Set in North Carolina in the 1960s, North Star is the story of Relia, an African-American girl, searching for her place to shine in both society and her personal life. The joyous innocence of Relia’s summer is transformed by the rising tensions of the growing civil rights movement. Relia’s parents are hotly divided between letting her participate in the demonstrations and shielding her from harsh realities of the civil rights struggle and their community’s battle for freedom. Relia’s memories of magical moments stargazing with her father help guide her as she risks her life to be a part of the “Dream” and the “Big Freedom.” Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times says North Star has a “strong poetic streak, appealing characters… and a sense of humor.”

Publisher:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1980

Paperback:
127 pages

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North Star
Gloria Bond Clunie

Best Price $17.50
The Odyssey
by Derek Walcott, Homer Odyssey

With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey, commissioned by Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company and first performed in 1992, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem Omeros.

Walcott vividly reimagines Odysseus’ drawn-out wanderings, from fallen Troy to his island kingdom of Ithaca; Telemachus’ coming of age and Helen’s aging charm; Penelope’s wile and the will of Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea; the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revelers, and the various ghosts and mermaids who vie one after another to ensnare the hero, while the blind singer-sage Billy Blue appears in multiple guises to deliver his commentary. Revisiting Homer’s great subject in his melodious, richly figurative verse, Walcott revels here in his mastery of character and voice, and exemplifies what one critic, in praise of this rendering, called the poet’s “voluptuous metaphor making and severe truth telling.”
- Richard Corliss, Time



Publisher:
Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st ed edition (April 1, 1993)

Paperback:
159 pages
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Piano Lesson, The
by August Wilson

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spellbinding plays about the black experience in 20th century America as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family’s prized, hard-won possession, had been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles’s Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece’s exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real “piano lesson,” reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

“Heartstopping…The play’s real music is in the language…Mr. Wilson’s most virtuosic writing to date.”
-Frank Rich, New York Times

“Stupendous…rich and resonant.”
-Washington Post

“Feisty, ebullient, exuberant…Wilson is a consummate storyteller.”
-Los Angeles Times

Winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best new play, 1990

Publisher:
Plume; Reprint edition (December 1, 1990)

Paperback:
128 pages
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Pretty Fire
by Charlayne Woodard

Winner of the Los Angeles Critics Circle Award, Pretty Fire consists of five autobiographical vignettes that begin with Woodard's premature birth and end with her first solo performance in her church's junior choir, the event that set her career as a performer in motion. And quite a performer she is. Like the best of storytellers, Woodard picks out the essential elements of a scene and uses her voice as a tool: whispering about secrets, imitating the residents of her grandparents' neighborhood, even bursting into song. She practically jumps out of the tape player. L.A. Theatre Works records in front of a live audience, and, in this production, the laughter and quiet spells contribute to funny and poignant moments, giving one the feeling of a live experience. A pure joy and highly recommended. -Adrienne Furness, Genesee Community Coll., Batavia, NY

Publisher:
Dramatist's Play Service (March 30, 2005)

Paperback:
51 pages
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Real Women Have Curves
by Josefina Lopez

Josefina Lopez was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Her parents migrated to the U.S. when she was five. For 13 years, she and her brothers and sisters lived as “undocumented residents” until they obtained legal residence through the Simpson-Rodino Amnesty Law in 1987. This experience served as inspiration for Real Women Have Curves, written at age 18. Ms. Lopez is currently residing in East L.A. and is working on several projects for film, tv and theater, including a “One-Woman Show.” Ms. Lopez’s goal as a Chicana writer is to change the negative representation of Latinas and Latinos in the theater and in Hollywood.

Publisher:
Dramatic Pub. (December 1, 1996)

Paperback:
80 pages
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Remembrance and Pantomine
by Derek Walcott

First produced by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1979, Remembrance is the story of an evasively eloquent retired teacher who cannot reconcile his anachronistic love of British culture with the evolution of his family and community independent Trinidad. “A lyrical, audience-pleasing work” (Variety). “Mr. Walcott is a poet, and his writing is of a quality we seldom hear in the theatre.” (The New Yorker).

Pantomine is a fast-paced comedy set in Tobago. In the hope of entertaining future guests, an English hotel owner proposes that he and his black handyman work up a satire on the Robinson Crusoe story. The play was produced by BBC Radio and London’s Keskidee Theatre in 1979. “A brilliantly extended set of variations on the master-and-servant relationship” (The Times). “Gentle wit, immaculately placed irony” (New Statesman). “Dazzling theatrical virtuosity” (Financial Times).

Publisher:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1986

Paperback
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Seven Guitars
by August Wilson

It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh’s Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there’s the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts.

August Wilson’s Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in his continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd “Schoolboy” Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they reminisce about his short life and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

Publisher:
Plume (August 1, 1997)

Paperback:
128 pages
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Sorrows and Rejoices
by Athol Fugard

With Sorrows and Rejoicings, South African playwright, Athol Fugard, returns to the stage with one of his most stunningly fierce and lyrical plays to date. In the semi-desert Karoo region of southern Africa, two women meet: one white, the other black-they seem to have little in common except their love of one man, an exiled poet deeply connected to his homeland. But after the leukemia-stricken poet returns to his village to die, his passing leaves the women struggling to reconcile the secrets of the past, and their hopes for post-apartheid South Africa. Once again Fugard poignantly demonstrates the human struggle to transcend the treacherous injustices of history.

Publisher:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1980

Paperback:
127 pages

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Sorrows and Rejoices
Athol Fugard

Best Price $9.99
The Resurrection of Lady Lester
by Lorraine Hansberry

Here are Lorraine Hansberry's last three plays--Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers?--representing the capstone of her achievement. Includes a new preface by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff and a revised introduction by Margaret B. Wilkerson.

Publisher:
Vintage; Reprint edition (December 13, 1994)

Paperback:
288 pages
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TopDog/Underdog
by Suzan-Lori Parks

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, forettling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group; 1st edition (February 4, 2002)

Paperback:
112 pages
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Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
by Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith's stunning new work of "documentary theater" in which she uses verbatim the words of people who experienced the Los Angeles riots to expose and explore the devastating human impact of that event.

Publisher:
Anchor (March 15, 1994)

Paperback:
320 pages
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Two Trains Running
by August Wilson

August Wilson has established himself as one of our most distinguished playwrights with his insightful, probing and evocative portraits of Black America and the African American experience in the twentieth century. Now, with the mesmerizing Two Trains Running, he has crafted what Time magazine has hailed as “his most mature works to date.” It is Pittsburgh, 1969, and the regulars of Memphis Lee’s restaurant are struggling to cope with turbulence of world that is changing rapidly around them and fighting back when they can. The diner is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city’s renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. For just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these people of “loud voices and big hearts” continue to search, to falter, to persevere, to hope. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events, and of unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary.

Pulitzer prize-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson

Publisher:
Plume Books (January 1, 1993)

Paperback:
110 pages
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Venus: A Play
by Suzan-Lori Parks

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group; 1st edition (September 1, 1997)

Paperback:
165 pages
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Zooman and The Sign
by Charles Fuller

Zooman and the Sign is a play of extraordinary power, depth and emotional complexity, about the impact of one single act of random violence on a family and on an entire community.

Zooman is a black teenager so full of contempt and rage he can hardly stop jittering. He struts and flashes his gun and “Ole Magic”---his 10-inch switchblade---and boasts of the terror he inflicts. “I just killed someone,” he tells us. “Little girl, I think.”

The little girl is Jinny Tate, the youngest child of a working-class family in a black Philadelphia neighborhood. For the Tates, the murder is shattering, made doubly painful by its senselessness. Reuben, Jinny’s father, rightly believes that many of his neighbors witnessed the shooting but remain silent out of fear. In a desperate, angry attempt to “make somebody come forward,” he hangs a sign on his porch, and forces on his community a question it would go to any length not to have to answer.

Zooman and the Sign is play of unusual insight and originality, full of the harshness of the street. Its subject---senseless violence and its consequences---reaches far beyond the Philadelphia neighborhood where the play is set. Fuller’s response to this violence---to the rage, the isolation, and the cycle of fear it creates---is both realistic and humane. Zooman is both tough and compassionate, “a powerful, tragic vision” in which “there are no real villains, only victims.”
- Frank Rich, The New York Times

The play is rich in contradiction, in a challenging overlap of right and wrong, in stage figures who are plausible people…absorbing…satisfying…serious work.”
-Walter Kerr, The New York Times

Winner – 1981 Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting

Publisher:
Samuel French Inc Plays (June 1, 2003)

Paperback:
71 pages
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Musicals
The Big Life
by Paul Sirett

‘Think about it. Think what you could achieve without women in your life. If all the time you spent on them, you spent on yourself. Think how much money you could save. Think how much aggravation you could avoid.’

Journeying over from the West Indies to England, Ferdy, Lennie, Dennis and Bernie are all eager to make successes of themselves and take full advantage of what they think the The Big Life has to offer. So they pledge to abstain from women for three years.

But Mary, Kathy, Zuleika and Sybil have other ideas. They know that man cannot live by bread alone! Will the men stick with their idea of The Big Life, or will Cupid have the final say?

Publisher:
Oberon Books (April 15, 2005)

Paperback:
96 pages
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Caroline, or Change
by Tony Kushner, Jeanine Tesori (Contributor)

"There are moments in the history of theatre when stagecraft takes a new turn. I like to think that this happened for the American musical last week, when Tony Kushner's Caroline, or Change (at the Public), a collaboration with composer Jeanine Tesori and the director George C. Wolfe, bushwhacked a path beyond the narrative end of the deconstructed, overfreighted musicals of the past thirty years."-John Lahr, The New Yorker Louisiana, 1963: A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship. Through their intimate story, this beautiful new musical portrays the changing rhythms of a nation. Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori have created a story that addresses contemporary questions of culture, community, race and class through the lens and musical pulse of the 1960s.

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group (September 15, 2004)

Paperback:
128 pages
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Colored Museum, The
by George C. Wolfe

The Colored Museum has electrified, discomforted, and delighted audiences of all colors, as it re-defines our ideas of what it means to be black in the 1980s. Its eleven “exhibits” cut the stilted legs out from under black stereotypes old and new, and return to the facts of what being black means.

“Mr. Wolfe is the kind of satirist who takes no prisoners. The shackles of the past have been defied by Mr. Wolfe’s fearless humor, and it’s a most liberating revolt.”
-Frank Rich, The New York Times

Publisher:
Grove Press (May 1, 1988)

Paperback:
62 pages
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Jelly's Last Jam
by George C. Wolfe (Editor), Susan Birkenhead (Editor), Jelly Roll Morton (Editor), Luther Henderson (Editor)

Let’s hail at last the breakthrough American musical of our time. Jelly’s Last Jam is extraordinary in its daring, the uncompressing gamble it takes, the high wire it walks. The most exciting musical since A Chorus Line, Jelly’s Last Jam thrusts the American musical into the modern age.”
-John Heilpern, New York Observer

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group (April 1, 1993)

Paperback:
128 pages
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Purlie
based on the play "Purlie Victorious" by Ossie Davis

Purlie is a musical based on the play Purlie Victorious (1961), a comedy lampooning racial stereotypes. This story is about a conniving preacher who sets out to buy a church in rural Georgia.

Ossie Davis wrote, acted, directed, and produced for theater and Hollywood. Davis, whose rich baritone and elegant, unshakable bearing made him a giant of the stage, screen and the civil rights movement — often in tandem with his wife, Ruby Dee, passed away in February, 2005 at the age of 87.
-Associated Press

Publisher:
S. French (1971)

Paperback:
73 pages
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Spunk: Three Tales
by Zora Neale Hurston, George C. Wolfe

The exploration and reevaluation of African-American culture George C. Wolfe began with his international success, The Colored Museum, continues with Spunk, a stage adaptation of three stories by Zora Neale Hurston.

In Sweat, a woman is abused by her husband and terrorized with a snake. The gigolos of Story in Harlem Slang stage a streetcorner brawl of style and braggadocio. In The Gilded Six-Bits, lovers are betrayed by a lust for gold but redeemed by the birth of child.

Using narration, dramatization, puppetry, dance and musical interludes, Wolfe creates from Hurston’s word-drunk prose a rich folk tapestry of rural and urban life earlier in this century.

Also included in this volume is music for the original country-blues songs composed by Chic Street Man.

Publisher:
Theatre Communications Group (June 1, 1991)

Paperback:
80 pages
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Stoning Mary
by Debbie Tucker Green

Mysterious while compelling, bewildering while intoxicating, Stoning Mary is a mix of Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Edward Bond. Yet Debbie Tucker Green has a voice all her own, one that mixes poetic rhythms with vernacular phrases, rap-song repetitions with complex psychology. In 2004, she won the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

Publisher:
Nick Hern Books (September 15, 2005)

Paperback:
96 pages
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The Blacks: A Clown Show
by Jean Genet

Publisher:
Grove Press (May 1, 1969)

Paperback:
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Wiz, The
based on a play by William F. Brown and the book "The Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum

Ease on Down the Road * Believe in Yourself * Home and other great selections from this memorable retelling of The Wizard of Oz.

Publisher:
Warner Bros Pubns (July, 1999)

Paperback:
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