Contemporary Plays by Women of Color

In Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, editors Kathy Perkins and Roberta Uno present 18 plays, each marked both by a specific cultural orientation and by the assumption of an underlying identification between women of color in the United States. This anthology is as remarkable for its sense of community and commonality between women as it is for its diversity. At the same time it explicitly presents to the reader an idea of the universal that transcends the particulars of ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, and gender itself. The undertaking is deceptively simple, even obvious: against the backdrop of a dominant culture which still almost totally drowns out nonwhite, nonmale voices, to provide a medium through which a plurality of women’s voices may be heard. To do so, the editors position the writers to speak for themselves in introductory statements as well as in the plays, with as little visible mediation as possible.

In her part of the anthology’s introductory essays, Uno speaks of respect for cultural autonomy, for preserving difference while providing the potential for recognition of sameness, without which the anthology “might become a muddied plate or a hollow new-age minstrel show” (10). She adds:

The plays of this volume are diverse in their aesthetics, structures, and themes; yet there are points of intersection and refraction that unintentionally emerge as dialogue, as refrain, as a response to a call. Their collective presentation is an invitation to the reader to seek both parallels and differences, to confront the flash points where perceptions collide and to look deeply into and through the mirrors and windows where mutuality of experience exists.

(10)

Yet, far from being unintentional, the structure of the book, in particular the ordering of plays, has been very carefully calculated so that each piece resonates with what has gone before and foreshadows what is to come, and so that the accumulation of voices is multilayered, inclusive, and profoundly celebratory.

While they present a sharply critical vision of the theatrical and social realities of the United States, the contributors to this anthology are also highly idealistic. In their introduction, the editors’ two voices are separate and entwined, alternating and exchanging accounts, acknowledging and extending personal histories, theatrical philosophies, and political agendas. They begin by telling their individual stories of powerlessness and subsequent empowerment, of their encounters with each other, of converting a sense of isolation in the ethnic communities of their childhoods and their subsequent alienation within academic and theatrical communities into their recognition of themselves as women of color in the theatre. In reclaiming the hidden voices of others, these writers find their own.

For the playwrights, too, the personal is the theatrical is the political. Virtually all of the contributors use their introductory statements to describe their work in terms of writing from personal experiences and desires in order to evoke a kind of universal emotional, and by definition human, recognition. As the particular contains within it the possibility of the whole, so too the past informs the present, becoming the material from which identity may be positively constructed. The words of the first playwright, Brenda Wong Aoki (The Queen’s Garden), are echoed by many of the others:

I am continually moved by the poignancy of life: by the heroic efforts people make just trying to live as human beings in this world at this time. In my work, I try to cut down to the emotional truth. It’s a very physical thing for me. It comes out of my chest and moves to that little groove at the base of my throat. Right there. If it starts to ache, I know it’s right. I know it’s universal, and I know I got to tell the story.

(14)

As preface to her play, Flyin’ West, Pearl Cleage adds: “My work is deeply rooted in, and consciously reflective of, African-American history and culture since I believe that it is by accurately expressing our very specific and highly individual realities that we discover our common humanity” (46). In her introduction to The Have-Little, Migdalia Cruz notes how deeply personal her play is, a way of preserving and paying respect to her memories: of a best friend raped and murdered at the age of eight, of another friend who became pregnant at 13 and was dead of an overdose at 15, and of yet another who became a cop. Her play is specific to her childhood in the South Bronx during the 1970s yet at the same time its humanity is potentially universal. For her, her central character, Lillian, represents

what was taken from me too young—that which I yearn for still. The world of poverty that surrounds Lillian is my world, and by writing the play I hope others are able to recognize it and appreciate the beauty of its humanity and mourn the loss of its children.

(106–07)

The dominant mode of representation is the telling of stories and of history: as actual and imagined; as their own, as those of their families and ancestors, and as those of their communities. For the most part the plays act as a kind of theatrical consciousness-raising cum exorcism, using direct address variously in combination with theatrical innovation and dramatic interaction. Many of the plays remain firmly rooted in American realism, a limitation that is not entirely mitigated by the mimetic exactitude and emotional intensity of the stories presented. Although the women they present are not necessarily victims and their environments are not necessarily confined to kitchens and living rooms, a sense of the playwrights and their subjects fitting into rather than confronting the social order lingers, without a concomitant challenge to the theatrical order.

The best of these realistic plays and hybrids—Flyin’ West (Pearl Cleage), Come Down Burning (Kia Corthron), Heroes and Saints (Cherríe Moraga), and How Else Am I Supposed to Know I’m Still Alive (Evelina Fernandez)—are intensely engaging, vivid presentations of women struggling to hold their own and to protect each other against the imprecations of outsiders. In these plays, as in many of the others, the bodies of certain male and female characters are constructed as symbols. The paralyzed legs of Corthron’s Skoolie and the enormous, disembodied head of Moraga’s Cerezita theatrically and thematically literalize the effects of oppression and the struggle to act positively, while in How Else Am I Supposed to Know I’m Still Alive the presence of the man—his appetites and his potential as a lover—is limited to an enormous belly in the doorway.

Other playtexts—including the brief excerpt from Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, Brenda Wong Aoki’s The Queen’s Garden, and China Doll by Elizabeth Wong—offer eloquent solo pieces in which multiple stories and identities are presented directly to the audience by a single woman. Some place ritual at the heart of their pieces: 1992: Blood Speaks (Elvira and Hortensia Colorado) and Sun Moon and Feather (Spiderwoman Theater) both interweave multiple theatricalities, narratives, images, objects, songs, and gestures to commemorate the past and celebrate their own and their people’s survival. A few—Combination Skin (Lisa Jones), Re/membering Aunt Jemima: A Menstrual Show (Breena Clarke and Glenda Dickerson), and R.A.W. (‘Cause I’m a Woman) (Diana Son)—are more explicitly agit-prop, successfully combining minstrelsy with vaudeville to expose, via satire and parody, theatrical as well as social conventions.

The resource that this anthology provides to artists, scholars, and students is tremendous. In addition to the primary materials, the editors provide a long list of playwrights and theatres that were not included as well as a bibliography of other published plays by women of color, highlighting the full, rich context from which the chosen 18 have emerged. To put such a diverse range of playtexts and writings into the public arena, making them and their writers both visible and available more widely than before, ensures that more people than ever—students, scholars, and artists—will have access to these texts and, presumably, expand their visibility and circulation by discussing and producing them. There is the expectation that such plays written from the many diverse perspectives of women in the United States in its many different vernaculars will become more “popular”—included not as exceptions to the dominant culture but as representative of the many different cultures from which our national identity is composed.