Book picks similar to
Big White Fog by Theodore Ward
plays
drama
blackunion-read
african-american-lit
Nicu II and Victoria's Incestuous Romance
Kenneth Jarrett Singleton - 2013
Prince Nicu II and Princess Victoria's immutable, romantic feelings for one another forces them to engage in extremely risky actions and fabricate various falsehoods. Throughout the play Nicu II and Victoria deceive everyone; including their parents King Nicu I and Queen Isabella. Nicu II is presumptuous in character, therefore, he maintains an excessive confidence within himself that he and his sister's romantic relationship can continue without being discovered, but Victoria fears that they cannot continue their affair emotionally unscathed. Despite Victoria's worries, she continues with the relationship as Nicu II emboldens her more and more.
The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies [The Shoemaker's Holiday, Every Man In His Humour, Eastward Ho!] (Oxford English Drama)
Thomas Dekker - 2001
Included are The Roaring Girl, The Shoemaker's Holiday, Eastward Ho!, and Every Man in His Humour. The text is freshly edited using modern spelling. A critical introduction, a wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.
The Long And The Short And The Tall
Willis Hall - 1959
Many have large casts and an equal mix of boy and girl parts. Set in the Malayan jungle in 1942, this play explores what happens when soldiers have to confront the reality of war.
Billy Bishop Goes to War
John MacLachlan Gray - 1982
The Governor General’s Award-winning musical documents the glorious World War I exploits of Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop.
Hernani
Victor Hugo - 1830
Hernani (1830), by Victor Hugo (1802-85), created a major storm of protest but later won acceptance. This was the play that marked the triumph of Romanticism over Classicism. It was Hugo who led a group of young poets and artists that virtually waged war with the traditionalists on the opening night of this play, creating a scandal that guaranteed the success of the work and the eventual success of the movement.
Erasure
Percival Everett - 2001
But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection." "Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto." But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.
American Moor
Keith Hamilton Cobb - 2020
not necessarily in that order.Keith Hamilton Cobb embarks on a poetic exploration that examines the experience and perspective of black men in America through the metaphor of Shakespeare's character Othello, offering up a host of insights that are by turns introspective and indicting, difficult and deeply moving. American Moor is a play about race in America, but it is also a play about who gets to make art, who gets to play Shakespeare, about whose lives and perspectives matter, about actors and acting, and about the nature of unadulterated love.American Moor has been seen across America, including a successful run off-Broadway in 2019. This edition features an introduction by Professor Kim F. Hall, Barnard College.
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen - 1879
The play ushered in a new social era and "exploded like a bomb into contemporary life".
The Student Edition contains these exclusive features:
· A chronology of the playwright's life and work
· An introduction giving the background of the play
· Commentary on themes, characters. language and style
· Notes on individual words and phrases in the text
· Questions for further study
· Bibliography for further reading.
Harlem Duet
Djanet Sears - 1997
Winner of the Chalmers Play Award. A rhapsodic blues tragedy. Harlem Duet could be the prelude to Shakepeare's Othello, and recounts the tale of Othello and his first wife Billie (yes, before Desdemona). Set in contemporary Harlem at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards, the play explores the space where race and sex intersect. Harlem Duet is Billie's story.
Arden of Faversham
Anonymous
Its authorship is unknown, although suggestions include Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.Wealthy businessman Arden is convinced his wife Alice is cheating on him. He's right – but he doesn't know the full story. Determined to free herself from her miserable marriage, Alice is in fact plotting to have him murdered. As the assassins close in on their unwitting victim, husband, wife and lover find themselves locked in a deadly game.This edition of Arden of Faversham was published alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company's revival of the play in 2014, and features the text edited for the RSC production, and introductions by key members of its creative team.
Jasper Jones
Kate Mulvany - 2016
Overseas, war is raging in Vietnam, Civil Rights marches are on the streets, and women’s liberation is stirring – but at home in Corrigan Charlie Bucktin dreams of writing the Great Australian Novel. Charlie’s 14 and smart. But when 16-year-old, constantly-in-trouble Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie’s out of his depth. Jasper has stumbled upon a terrible crime in the scrub nearby, and he knows he’s the first suspect – that goes with the colour of his skin. He needs every ounce of Charlie’s bookish brain to help solve this awful mystery before the town turns on Jasper. Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Craig Silvey’s award-winning novel is wise and beautiful. A coming-of-age story, Jasper Jones interweaves the lives of complex individuals all struggling to find happiness among the buried secrets of a small rural community.Whether you know the book or not, this piercing adaptation is very much worth seeing for the way it depicts – and shows ways across – some of the deep and enduring divides in our society." - Jason Blake SMH
Look Back in Anger
John Osborne - 1957
He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."