Synopses & Reviews
Awarded annually since 1987, the Theodore Ward Prize recognizes the outstanding individual accomplishments of African American playwrights, as well as their growing importance to the shape and direction of American drama in our time. This collection, edited by a director and educator who has been affiliated with the contest for fifteen of its seventeen years, showcases a selection of the award-winning plays and offers a rich and varied view of the best of two decades of evolving African American drama.
These seven plays, which span the Ward Prize's history, represent a wide range of talents, experience, and perspectives brought to bear on diverse themes, from a unique moment in the history of baseball's Negro League to a working-class couple contending with a neighborhood bully; from a child's memories of negotiating desegregation to coming of age amidst the ravages of racism, child abuse, and AIDS. By turns poetic and moving, brave and rousing, uproarious and unsettling, these works written by established and emerging playwrights allow actors, directors, theatergoers, and readers to sample the multifarious dramatic experience being limned by African American playwrights today.
Synopsis
Seven winners of the nation's most distinguished award for African American playwriting.
Synopsis
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About the Author
Chuck Smith is a resident director at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where his productions have included
The Gift Horse,
The Amen Corner,
A Raisin in the Sun,
Blues for an Alabama Sky,
Ma Rainey's Black
Bottom,
Black Star Line,
A Christmas Carol, and
The Meeting. Smith is also a faculty member in the Theater Department of Columbia College, Chicago.
Table of Contents
Plays: The Last Season, [Negro League - baseball]
Christopher Moore;
Fathers and Other Strangers, [psychiatrist, phychological realism] Jeff Stetson;
Jelly Belly, [domestic drama set in South Side of Chicago, 1980] Charles Smith;
North Star, [civil rights, family drama] Gloria Bond Clunie;
Hambone, [truth] Javon Johnson;
The Gift Horse, [young woman's search for identity] Lydia Diamond;
Kiwi Black, [father-son relationship] Shepsu Aakhu (Reggie Lawrence).