Playwright's Choice - ten plays recommended by Pearl Cleage

Black Issues Book Review, July, 2001 by Pearl Cleage

(A Raisin In the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry in Contemporary Black Drama, edited by Clinton F. Oliver and Stephanie Sills; Charles Scribner and Sons, 1971, ISBN 6-844-1432-5).

3. A Soldier's Story by Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982. It opened at The Negro Ensemble Company the year before with a cast that included Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson and Adolph Caesar. With an ending that will surprise you, the play is a riveting portrait of black men in the armed services.

(A Soldier's Story by Charles Fuller, in An Anthology of Black American Drama In America, edited by Darwin T. Turner; Howard University Press, 1994, $34.95, ISBN 0-882-58062-0).

4. Pretty Fire by Charlayne Woodard was published in 1995 after successful productions in Los Angeles and New York. On an almost bare stage, Woodward weaves her stories in language that is as familiar and as sweet as the scent of Dixie Peach.

(Pretty Fire by Charlayne Woodward; PLUME, 1995, published by The Penguin Group, $8.95, ISBN 0-452-27385-4).

5. Flyin' West by Pearl Cleage. My own 1994 play imagines the lives of four black women homesteaders in Kansas after the Civil War as they make new lives for themselves and their families. Inspired by seeing one too many movies where all the pioneers looked like John Wayne instead of my grandmomma.

(Flyin' West and Other Plays by Pearl Cleage; Theater Communications Group, Inc., 1999, $15.95, ISBN 1-55936-168-9).

6. Beauty's Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays by Dael Orlandersmith is a powerful new one-woman show divided into three extended monologues. The often painful stories are told without flinching and leave you, finally, with a true appreciation of the strength of the human spirit.

(Beauty's Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays by Dael Orlandersmith; Vintage Books, 2000, $12.00, ISBN 0-375-70871-5).

7. Fires In The Mirror by Anna Deavere Smith is another one-woman show with Smith inhabiting a wide range of characters as part of her continuing examination of race and class in America. Based on interviews with residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after the 1991 civil unrest in the area, the play is unique in its approach and forgiving in its world view.

(Fires In The Mirror, 1993 by Anna Deavere Smith, Doubleday, $10.00, ISBN 0-385-47014-4).

8. A Black Woman Speaks by Beah Richards. This one may be hard to find, but it's well worth the effort. First performed by Richards herself in 1950 for a white woman's peace organization in Chicago, its stinging and lucid criticism of the minefields that divide white and black women is as revolutionary today as it was then. A Black Woman speaks in 9 Plays by Black Women, edited by Margaret B. Wilkerson; Mentor, Penguin Group, 1989, $5.99, ISBN 0-451-62820-9.

9. Trouble In Mind, a "comedy-drama in two acts" by Alice Childress, appeared in 1955 and examined the problems of a group of black actors trying not to get caught up in other peoples views of who and what they are. Accurate and funny, it is as timely as a film by Spike Lee.