Set in 1955, in the redwood country north of San Francisco. Bulrusher is the name given to a baby girl found floating in a basket on the river. As the girl grows up she develops a gift for clairvoyance that makes her feel isolated until a new girl moves into town.
In September 2021, playwright/performers Eisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker's performance ritual, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). In January 2022, they met again to discuss Davis's installation performance piece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in 2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirror each other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generational trauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given the commodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How to acknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform without being captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?
In the plays collected here--Ramp and Mushroom--PulitzerPrize finalist Eisa Davis mingles modes of myth and speculation,documentary and fiction in two plays about family, desire, restorativejustice, ecological sustainability, and immigration amongst the workingclass. Ramp adapts the foundational Egyption saga of Isis /Osiris and sets on a near-future airline ramp, where siblings Isis,Osiris, Seth, and Nepthys throw luggage on planes and bicker about ourthorny, precipitate futurity: should change be fast or gradual? Can theecological revolution we require for survival produce ease and peace ifit's rooted in violence? Is the path to utopia brutal? Must it be? Mushroomcenters on the lives, loves, and working conditions of the Mexican andCentral American mushroom-pickers in and around the town of KennettSquare, Pennsylvania, where over 40% of all the mushrooms we eat in thiscountry come from. Through a series of intersectingnarratives traversed by English, Spanish, K'iche' and Malayalamspeakers, Mushroom considers a workplace dispute that hasserious ramifications for multiple immigrant families, mappinghow compassion and justice might intersect.
Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre. Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.
Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre. Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.
Set in 1955, in the redwood country north of San Francisco. Bulrusher is the name given to a baby girl found floating in a basket on the river. As the girl grows up she develops a gift for clairvoyance that makes her feel isolated until a new girl moves into town.
This profound and intense debut novel is the story of a young African American woman from West Philadelphia who finds her path to a bright future in gentrified Brooklyn, New York, blocked when she can't let go of the love she lost.
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