The Methuen Drama Book of Post-Black Plays: Bulrusher; Good Goods; The Shipment; Satellites; And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi; Antebellum; In the Continuum; Black Diamond (Play Anthologies)

I devoured the eight plays in this fascination anthology. The introductory essay explains “post-black” as the artists’ desire to reject an ethnic label for their work, while still embracing their own, personal ethnic label. So it is about expanding the possibilities of the art being created, denying any form of restriction to the “message” that this is a “Black” play.The collection is broken into four parts with two plays for each part. First are plays that focus on family and I loved both of them -- Bulrusher and Good Goods. Both were chock full of originality and totally engrossing. Bulrusher was a Pulitzer Prize nominee.The second part focused on plays by non-Black playwrights that still lived in the post-Black world. It contained The Shipment (very trippy and experimental) and Satellites which was one of the more disappointing plays in the collection. Just didn’t really go anywhere.Third section was my favorite (partly because of my love for history). It contained two plays that were set in the past in order to draw parallels to the present. The first ...And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi was set during the Civil War and was beautifully poetic and imaginative in its storytelling approach. My favorite of the entire collection was Antebellum, set in the late 1930s in both Atlanta and Germany. The stories of racism against Blacks and Jews is interwoven with issues of homophobia and gender transitions. It’s brilliantly structured and devastatingly moving.The collection closes with two plays with ties to the continent of Africa, intersecting the African American experience with that of Africans. In the Continuum was more difficult to process because it contained a very loose continuity between its two main characters (and all the other people in their stories...all played by the same two actors who play the main characters). More fascinating was Black Diamond. A highly theatrical piece that embeds an African American journalist in the Liberian civil war where he experiences the horrors of that conflict as well as the American responsibility for much of it.A highly diverse collection of plays that those of us in the theatre profession would benefit from reading...and then working to bring some to our stages.

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