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Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays
An anthology of twelve outstanding plays by a new generation of African-American playwrights includes Suzan Lori-Parks's Obie Award-winning Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom, as well as works by Cheryl L. West, Shay Youngblood, Robert Alexander, Kia Corthron, Keith Antar Mason, and others.
656 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published November 1, 1996
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 31, 2021
This collection is characterized chiefly by the formal innovation of its contributors. As Elam reminds us in his introduction to the collection, we need to rethink what a Black play is, and the plays in this collection depart starkly from the kind of realism that August Wilson gives us in his plays (I use realism cautiously – I know Wilson's plays have a great deal of magic in them). There are twelve plays in this collection. They are definitely uneven in terms of quality, but all of them attempt do very different things in terms of how they conceive of theatre and the capabilities of the theatrical form.
Robert Alexander's I Ain't Yo' Uncle: the New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin is fun for a time, but feels kind of like an extended bit. At its best it's an interesting intellectual exercise. But the topics it is eventually invested in interrogating – the virtues of violent rebellion, the value of sacrifice, urban disaffection, the dishonesty of white folks – it scratches only the surfaces of these. None of these issues is investigated with any depth at all. It's as if the majority of I Ain't Yo' Uncle is designed to tell us things we already know. I will say that rewriting Topsy and transforming George into Nat Tuner both prove to be fascinating ideas, I just wish the play were more invested in thinking them through rather than simply presenting them to us.
Carlyle Brown's The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show is an excellent little play. It's one of these plays that is about Black theatre history that also responds to the types and tropes of Black theatre history while also attempting to honor the true artistry that Black theatre artists possessed and showcased in their work. Now, all of theatre history is filled with these types of plays, and to my mind, they tend not to work: they try to squeeze too many facts in, or they try to make sure the audience hears the story of every important Black artist the author can remember, or worse yet they don't really have a plot. The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show does absolutely everything right. It has a cakewalk in it; it has great music; it has August Wilson-style arias; it has great stories and great drama; and it has an excellent plot. The whole thing just works. What is surprising to me is that this Carlyle Brown play has not received the kind of recognition it ought to have. Artists are, naturally, still trying to wrestle theatrically with minstrelsy and its legacies, but this is a play that already does this very well.
Breena Clarke and Glenda Dickerson's Re/membering Aunt Jemima: a Menstrual Show was not for me. It seems like a rehearsal of a lot of stereotypes of Black women without really saying anything about them or asking us to think any differently about them.
Keith Antar Mason's for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much is quite obviously a response to Ntozake Shange's famous play. It follows Shange's form, but it is not about achieving identity the way that for colored girls... is fundamentally about asking Black women to come together.
Pomo Afro Homos' Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life is very funny and wonderfully silly and campy, but it's also pointed and smart. Riffing on George C. Wolfe and In Living Color, this is a delight of a play.
Talvin Wilks' Tod, the Boy, Tod is rough. Formally, this is interesting – it is a kind of psychodrama in which a son processes his white-in-Blackness, accusations of being too white and desiring access to white privilege. But it's also very much about one author processing his difficulties with his parents, and telling us about his pain. Also, there are just too many white people in it. This is pretty painful, even though one can see what Wilks was trying to do.
Now, Rhodessa Jones' Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women on the other hand is probably my favorite play in this collection. It's a piece about incarcerated women and incarceration in general. It's a play with humor and poignancy that's also about loss – private losses and national ones – and how we go about processing that grief. It's filled with dance while also being filled with poetry. It's so smart and so good, and as far as I know you can only find it in this collection, although you can also read about Jones' work in Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones & Theater for Incarcerated Women. In any case, Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women is one very very good reason to get ahold of this collection.
Shay Youngblood's Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery is a kind of sweet memory play where a woman remembers the women who raised her who have now passed on. It's filled with wonderful choral sequences where the women all talk to one another – a bit more like a straightened up, more realistic Sharon Bridgforth play. Ok, that's a silly description, but it's about a community of women raising a girl and the girl growing into a woman and learning to honor those women.
Kia Corthron's Come Down Burning is a very dark play about child-rearing, depression, disability and co-dependence. It's very interesting and it was certainly weird enough to keep my attention, but I'm not sure it's very enjoyable to read (or, indeed, to watch). But Corthron's language and way of writing is so pleasurable in and of itself, that I guess I take it back. The writing is pleasurable; the plot less so.
Three more. Wayne Corbitt's Crying Holy is a decidedly confused text that is more in love with its own language than it is in coherence per se or in telling any kind of story. The poems are ok, if not my particular cup of tea, but this "play" really belongs on the page. I think it would have been much more interesting as a kind of autobiographical essay. The play just loves its main character way too much, and so it doesn't treat its other characters fairly (or fully!). He is right, and you can't tell him nothing. Corbitt tries, a bit, to balance things out with the other main character, the protagonist's mother, but this character seems to be too much of a puzzle to Corbitt, and he can't explain her behavior anymore than he can get her to say what our protagonist wants her to say. This is a painful play about homophobia and a man's relationship with his mother, and it's a very interesting pair with Cheryl West's Before It Hits Home. Both plays involve a man coming home to stay with his family in the South because he has HIV. And both plays find the family dealing with this very, very poorly. West's is the more interesting play, but both plays are really difficult. I think perhaps I have trouble relating to these texts because I don't really understand the need for family to behave the way we want them to behave. I have a lot of trouble relating. Anyway, both plays are uneven, but both have many redeeming qualities. Before It Hits Home, especially, is very moving and very sad.
I cannot get started on Suzan-Lori Parks' Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. I find this entire thing pretentious as all Hell and I have no time for it. I know people like Parks' work, and I support them, but her work is not for me. (I actually like a couple of her plays, if I'm honest. But not this one.)
Robert Alexander's I Ain't Yo' Uncle: the New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin is fun for a time, but feels kind of like an extended bit. At its best it's an interesting intellectual exercise. But the topics it is eventually invested in interrogating – the virtues of violent rebellion, the value of sacrifice, urban disaffection, the dishonesty of white folks – it scratches only the surfaces of these. None of these issues is investigated with any depth at all. It's as if the majority of I Ain't Yo' Uncle is designed to tell us things we already know. I will say that rewriting Topsy and transforming George into Nat Tuner both prove to be fascinating ideas, I just wish the play were more invested in thinking them through rather than simply presenting them to us.
Carlyle Brown's The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show is an excellent little play. It's one of these plays that is about Black theatre history that also responds to the types and tropes of Black theatre history while also attempting to honor the true artistry that Black theatre artists possessed and showcased in their work. Now, all of theatre history is filled with these types of plays, and to my mind, they tend not to work: they try to squeeze too many facts in, or they try to make sure the audience hears the story of every important Black artist the author can remember, or worse yet they don't really have a plot. The Little Tommy Parker Celebrated Colored Minstrel Show does absolutely everything right. It has a cakewalk in it; it has great music; it has August Wilson-style arias; it has great stories and great drama; and it has an excellent plot. The whole thing just works. What is surprising to me is that this Carlyle Brown play has not received the kind of recognition it ought to have. Artists are, naturally, still trying to wrestle theatrically with minstrelsy and its legacies, but this is a play that already does this very well.
Breena Clarke and Glenda Dickerson's Re/membering Aunt Jemima: a Menstrual Show was not for me. It seems like a rehearsal of a lot of stereotypes of Black women without really saying anything about them or asking us to think any differently about them.
Keith Antar Mason's for black boys who have considered homicide when the streets were too much is quite obviously a response to Ntozake Shange's famous play. It follows Shange's form, but it is not about achieving identity the way that for colored girls... is fundamentally about asking Black women to come together.
Pomo Afro Homos' Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life is very funny and wonderfully silly and campy, but it's also pointed and smart. Riffing on George C. Wolfe and In Living Color, this is a delight of a play.
Talvin Wilks' Tod, the Boy, Tod is rough. Formally, this is interesting – it is a kind of psychodrama in which a son processes his white-in-Blackness, accusations of being too white and desiring access to white privilege. But it's also very much about one author processing his difficulties with his parents, and telling us about his pain. Also, there are just too many white people in it. This is pretty painful, even though one can see what Wilks was trying to do.
Now, Rhodessa Jones' Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women on the other hand is probably my favorite play in this collection. It's a piece about incarcerated women and incarceration in general. It's a play with humor and poignancy that's also about loss – private losses and national ones – and how we go about processing that grief. It's filled with dance while also being filled with poetry. It's so smart and so good, and as far as I know you can only find it in this collection, although you can also read about Jones' work in Rena Fraden's Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones & Theater for Incarcerated Women. In any case, Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women is one very very good reason to get ahold of this collection.
Shay Youngblood's Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery is a kind of sweet memory play where a woman remembers the women who raised her who have now passed on. It's filled with wonderful choral sequences where the women all talk to one another – a bit more like a straightened up, more realistic Sharon Bridgforth play. Ok, that's a silly description, but it's about a community of women raising a girl and the girl growing into a woman and learning to honor those women.
Kia Corthron's Come Down Burning is a very dark play about child-rearing, depression, disability and co-dependence. It's very interesting and it was certainly weird enough to keep my attention, but I'm not sure it's very enjoyable to read (or, indeed, to watch). But Corthron's language and way of writing is so pleasurable in and of itself, that I guess I take it back. The writing is pleasurable; the plot less so.
Three more. Wayne Corbitt's Crying Holy is a decidedly confused text that is more in love with its own language than it is in coherence per se or in telling any kind of story. The poems are ok, if not my particular cup of tea, but this "play" really belongs on the page. I think it would have been much more interesting as a kind of autobiographical essay. The play just loves its main character way too much, and so it doesn't treat its other characters fairly (or fully!). He is right, and you can't tell him nothing. Corbitt tries, a bit, to balance things out with the other main character, the protagonist's mother, but this character seems to be too much of a puzzle to Corbitt, and he can't explain her behavior anymore than he can get her to say what our protagonist wants her to say. This is a painful play about homophobia and a man's relationship with his mother, and it's a very interesting pair with Cheryl West's Before It Hits Home. Both plays involve a man coming home to stay with his family in the South because he has HIV. And both plays find the family dealing with this very, very poorly. West's is the more interesting play, but both plays are really difficult. I think perhaps I have trouble relating to these texts because I don't really understand the need for family to behave the way we want them to behave. I have a lot of trouble relating. Anyway, both plays are uneven, but both have many redeeming qualities. Before It Hits Home, especially, is very moving and very sad.
I cannot get started on Suzan-Lori Parks' Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom. I find this entire thing pretentious as all Hell and I have no time for it. I know people like Parks' work, and I support them, but her work is not for me. (I actually like a couple of her plays, if I'm honest. But not this one.)
Want to read
May 29, 2025Cutting is from Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women
By Rhodessa Jones
Poetry cutting is for For Black Boys -- A Collection
By Jasmine Mans, Margaret Burroughs
and Keith Antar Mason
By Rhodessa Jones
Poetry cutting is for For Black Boys -- A Collection
By Jasmine Mans, Margaret Burroughs
and Keith Antar Mason
May 24, 2007
I liked most of the plays, but I don-t really read plays or perform like that, so to me it was just a book. I read almost all of the plays, but got kinda tired of it after a whle. I-d really love to see these acted out though, so if you know of any performances of any of the playwrights or these specific plays, pass the word along.
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