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Based at Shepherd University, in West Virginia, the Contemporary American Theater Festival is nationally and internationally recognized as a home for playwrights and the development and production of new plays. The Festival makes it a priority to celebrate and produce playwrights with strong, distinct voices, with a core value to tell diverse stories. This anthology of work provides plays that speak to one of the most compelling virtues of artists everywhere – freedom of speech. A necessary volume of women playwrights' work, ranging from a two-time Obie Award-winning author to emerging writers just beginning their careers, it represents a group of women who vary in age, race and sexual orientation and offers an invitation to artistic leaders, scholars and students to embrace gritty, thought-provoking new dramatic work. Edited by The Festival's Producing Directors Peggy McKowen and Ed Herendeen, this anthology features an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage. Each of the five powerful plays is followed by an informative and discursive playwright interview conducted by Sharon J. Anderson that contextualizes and develops the works within the wider context of the annual festival. The plays include: Gidion's Knot by Johnna Adams The Niceties by Eleanor Burgess Memoirs of a Forgotten Man by D.W Gregory Dead and Breathing by Chisa Hutchinson 20th Century Blues by Susan Miller
After surviving a fire in a homeless shelter, two Iraqi Freedom vets, Alicia G. and Horace Lloyd, are sent to a motel outside the city where they will be safe for the night. Both are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder-- Alicia as a consequence of a gang rape by three fellow soldiers while in Iraq and Horace from battlefield pressure linked to his Army MOS as a sniper. The two of them have been together for more than nine months, Horace acting as a kind of helpmate to Alicia, who was so traumatized by the rape that she can't even consider having a normal relationship with a man. Their arrival at the motel introduces them to the owner Doug Mensing, called Meny, and the beginning of our understanding of the trials sexually abused women face in the American military. Alicia refused to stay silent like so many other women and fought while she was in the Army to have the rapists punished. But only two of the men were charged and merely given pay reductions, while the third man was never named or prosecuted. Once discharged, she received little help from the VA. She found herself rejected by a religious mother who blamed everything that happened to Alicia on a "God-less army peopled by marching masturbators." Exhausted from the loss of all their possessions, and having reached a motel they thought would provide them with shelter, Alicia and Horace find themselves instead in a highway bordello. Here, throughout one night, old wounds are opened, flashbacks recount their histories and the truth of events they both hoped were over emerge from the past to color the rest of their future.
Amina and Ryan are both officers on the Cleveland police force. Amina is black, Ryan is white, and they are falling deeply and passionately in love. When an officer-involved shooting roils the department, small cracks in their relationship widen into a chasm of confusion and self-doubt. A mystery and a love story with high stakes and no easy answers, SHEEPDOG fearlessly examines police violence, interracial love, and class in the 21st century.
Over the course of a parent/teacher conference, a grieving mother and an emotionally overwhelmed primary school teacher have a fraught conversation about the tragic suicide of the mother's son, Gidion. Gidion may have been bullied severely—or he may have been an abuser. As his story is slowly uncovered, the women try to reconstruct a satisfying explanation for Gidion's act and come to terms with excruciating feelings of culpability.
Della makes cakes, not judgment calls – those she leaves to her husband, Tim. But when the girl she helped raise comes back home to North Carolina to get married, and the fiancé is actually a fiancée, Della’s life gets turned upside down. She can’t really make a cake for such a wedding, can she? For the first time in her life, Della has to think for herself.
Four women meet once a year for a ritual photo shoot, chronicling their changing (and aging) selves as they navigate love, careers, children, and the complications of history. But when these private photographs threaten to go public, relationships are tested, forcing the women to confront who they are and how they’ll deal with whatever lies ahead. 20TH CENTURY BLUES is a sharply funny and evocative play by Obie Award and Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winner Susan Miller that questions our place in the world and with one another.
Dramaturgy: The Basics introduces the art of dramaturgy, explaining how dramaturgy works, what a dramaturg is, and how to appreciate their unique contribution to theatre-making. A wide-ranging account of the role of this vital element of theatre helps students and aspiring performance makers to apply dramaturgy to a full spectrum of theatrical disciplines. This guidebook teaches dramatic theories and script analysis as essential skills for aspiring dramaturgs and illustrates the various methods of reading for specific functions of dramaturgy. Dramaturgy: The Basics offers practical step-by-step instructions on how to practice production dramaturgy, dramaturgy of new work, translation, adaptation, devised theatre, site-specific theatre, literary management, criticism, editing, producing, and dramaturgical innovation, with detailed questions to consider at each stage of the process. This book aims to help students develop a dramaturgical mindset, enabling them to build a critical, inquisitive, and socially conscious perspective that is beneficial in all professions and relationships. Resource lists, further reading guides, and chapter summaries make this an outstanding guidebook. An essential read for anyone hoping to make, understand, or discuss theatre, Dramaturgy: The Basics provides a clear, accessible resource for approaching this integral but often misunderstood facet of theatre-making.
A lamppost. Night. Two friends are passing time. Stuck. Waiting for change. Inspired by Waiting for Godot and the Exodus, Antoinette Nwandu fuses poetry, humour and humanity in a rare and politically charged new play which exposes the experiences of young men in a world that refuses to see them. Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu received its UK premiere at the Kiln Theatre, London, in February 2020.
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's powerful drama Lidless asks important and difficult questions: is guilt a necessary form of moral reckoning, or is it an obstacle to be overcome? Will the price of national political amnesia be paid only by the next generation - the daughters and sons who were never there? It's been fifteen years since Guantánamo, fifteen years since Bashir last saw his U.S. Army interrogator, Alice. Bashir is now dying of a disease of the liver, an organ that he believes is the home of the soul. He tracks down Alice in Texas and demands that she donate half her liver as restitution for the damage wrought during her interrogations. But Alice doesn't remember Bashir; a PTSD pill trial she participated in while in the army has left her without any memory of her time there. It is only when her inquisitive fourteen-year-old daughter begins her own investigation that the fragile peace of mind that Alice's drug-induced oblivion enabled begins to falter. Although politically engaged and topical, the play's significance is further-reaching and taps into timeless questions. Lidless portrays the inevitable consequences of moral crimes, in spite of the lapse of time and the oblivion of the perpetrators. Guilt inexorably engenders retribution with a horrible symmetry, so comeuppance is exacted upon what is held most dear. Within a modern and politically-charged setting, Lidless has a tight plot of cyclical, interfamilial violence and inevitable, if blindly executed, vengeance.
In her first posthumous work, the revered poet crafts a personal history of Black dance and captures the careers of legendary dancers along with her own rhythmic beginnings. Many learned of Ntozake Shange’s ability to blend movement with words when her acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf made its way to Broadway in 1976, eventually winning an Obie Award the following year. But before she found fame as a writer, poet, performer, dancer, and storyteller, she was an untrained student who found her footing in others’ classrooms. Dance We Do is a tribute to those who taught her and her passion for rhythm, movement, and dance. After 20 years of research, writing, and devotion, Ntozake Shange tells her history of Black dance through a series of portraits of the dancers who trained her, moved with her, and inspired her to share the power of the Black body with her audience. Shange celebrates and honors the contributions of the often unrecognized pioneers who continued the path Katherine Dunham paved through the twentieth century. Dance We Do features a stunning photo insert along with personal interviews with Mickey Davidson, Halifu Osumare, Camille Brown, and Dianne McIntyre. In what is now one of her final works, Ntozake Shange welcomes the reader into the world she loved best.