Best African American Dramas & Plays Books
Here you will get Best African American Dramas & Plays Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Fences
Author: by August Wilson
Plume
English
101 pages
From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive.
Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.
This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Now an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Viola Davis.
2. Ethic 2 (2)
Author: by Ashley Antoinette
English
288 pages
1732831300
Love should burn slowly, but with Ezra “Ethic” Okafor it is always fleeting. After an accidental killing affects Alani, the woman he loves, she thinks he’s a monster. Separated by tragedy, the pair endure a loss like nothing they have ever felt and their connection is impossible to repair.
Ethic is reduced to misery and raising his children alone once again. With Morgan in the throes of a passionate love affair and Bella in need of guidance that he can’t provide, Ethic is in turmoil. He’s failing as a man and the fingerprint he is leaving on the world is a bloody one.
In this second installment of this epic love story, Ashley Antoinette taps into the soul of her readers as she explores the limits of love and forgiveness. Is anything truly unforgivable? Or is Ethic the one man who can love a woman back from the edge of madness.
Ashley Antoinette is one of the most prolific and successful writers of her generation. The feminine half of the popular duo (Ashley and JaQuavis) she has co-written over forty novels. She is most widely regarded for her racy, New York Times Best Selling series, The Prada Plan.
3. The Piano Lesson
Author: by August Wilson
Plume
English
144 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, this modern American classic is about family, and the legacy of slavery in America. August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences.
In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned perhaps his most haunting and dramatic work. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family’s prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles’s Pittsburgh home.
When Boy Willie, Berniece’s exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future.
4. August Wilson Century Cycle
Author: by August Wilson
English
10 pages
155936307X
Series introduction by John Lahr with individual volumes introduced by Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Marion McClinton, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Phylicia Rashad, Ishmael Reed, and Frank Rich. “No one except perhaps Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater.” -John Lahr, The New Yorker “Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story….
For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned.”-Tony Kushner August Wilson’s Century Cycle is “one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken.” (The New York Times) With it, Wilson dramatizes the African American experience and heritage in the twentieth century, with a play for each decade, almost all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up.
5. Slave Play
Author: by Jeremy O. Harris
English
120 pages
1559369787
The single most daring thing I’ve seen in a theater in a long time. Wesley Morris, New York Times The Old South lives on at the MacGregor Plantationin the breeze, in the cotton fieldsand in the crack of the whip.
Nothing is as it seems, and yet everything is as it seems. Slave Play rips apart history to shed new light on the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in twenty-first-century America.
6. A Raisin in the Sun
Author: by Lorraine Hansberry
B005U3Z5MA
English
1596 KB
“Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. Indeed Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black Americaand changed American theater forever.
The play’s title comes from a line in Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which warns that a dream deferred might “dry up/like a raisin in the sun.””The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun,” said The New York Times.
“It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic.” This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry’s landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.
7. Sweat (TCG Edition)
Author: by Lynn Nottage
English
144 pages
1559365323
Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Nominee for 3 Tony Awards including Best Play Lynn Nottage’s best work. She offers a powerful critique of the American attitude toward class, and how it affects the decisions we make. Sweat has fraternity at its heart, but also the violence, and the suspicion that can result from class aspirations.
Hilton Als, New Yorker Lynn Nottage has written one of her most exquisitely devastating tragedies to date. In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggle to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near future.
Based on Nottage’s extensive research and interviews with residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America’s economic decline. Lynn Nottage is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prize Awards for Drama for Sweat and Ruined.
She is the first woman playwright to be honored twice. Her other plays include Intimate Apparel; By the Way, Meet Vera Stark; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; and Las Meninas.
8. Fairview
Author: by Jackie Sibblies Drury
English
120 pages
1559369523
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama Dazzling and ruthlessOne of the most exquisitely and systematically arranged ambushes of an unsuspecting audience in yearsA glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake.
Ben Brantley, New York Times Grandma’s birthday approaches. Beverly is organizing the perfect dinner, but everything seems doomed from the start: the silverware is all wrong, the carrots need chopping and the radio is on the fritz. What at first appears to be a family comedy takes a sharp, sly turn into a startling examination of deep-seated paradigms about race in America.
9. Ethic 3
Author: by Ashley Antoinette
English
262 pages
1732831327
Healing requires separation. When Ethic discovers malice in a woman he thought was perfect, he walks away from their love. Keeping his family safe is his main priority and falling for Alani Lenika Hill is dangerous. The history of their love haunts him however, and getting over her isn’t easy.
Alani has beguiled his two youngest children and they crave her presence as much as Ethic.They want a mother. He wants a woman, but with ghosts and lies between them the couple is forced apart yet again. With love comes pain and Ethic feels all of it.
He can’t focus on anything and while he is distracted by heartbreak, his eldest daughter, Morgan is caught up in a deceptive affair. With bad boy Messiah, pledging his allegiance to Morgan she is willing to defy everything and anyone to keep his love forever.
The story is a soul-stirring journey of love, loss, and forgiveness. Will Ethic finally receive everything he deserves? Or will karma circle back for him and destroy him for good? Ashly Antoinette has penned a new classic with the Ethic series.
10. Gem of the Ocean
Author: by August Wilson
English
112 pages
1559362804
No one except perhaps Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater. John Lahr, The New YorkerA swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty. Theatergoers who have followed August Wilson’s career will find in Gem a touchstone for everything else he has written.
Ben Brantley, The New York TimesWilson’s juiciest material. The play holds the stage and its characters hammer home, strongly, the notion of newfound freedom. Michael Phillips, Chicago TribuneGem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th centuryan unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prizewinning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson.
Aunt Esther, the drama’s 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life.
11. Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?
Author: by Lorraine Hansberry
Vintage
English
261 pages
Here are Lorraine Hansberry’s last three plays-Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? Representing the capstone of her achievement. Includes a new preface by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff and a revised introduction by Margaret B.Wilkerson.
12. Pipeline (TCG Edition)
Author: by Dominique Morisseau
English
96 pages
1559365870
Pipeline confirms Dominique Morisseau’s reputation as a playwright of piercing eloquence. Ben Brantley, New York Times With profound compassion and lyricism, Morisseau brings us a powerful play that delves into the urgent issue of the school-to-prison pipeline that ensnares people of color.
Issues of class, race, parenting, and education in America are brought to the frontlines, as we are left to question the systematic structures that ultimately trap underserved communities.
13. Two Trains Running
Author: by August Wilson
Plume
English
128 pages
Published in 1852, a mere nine years before the start of the US Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s heartbreaking classic “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” seeks to unmask the horrors of slavery, revealing the brutalities that those who had not witnessed them could never have imagined, the terrors that those in the thick of it struggled to deny.
In her story of suffering, barbarism, hope, and redemption, Stowe won millions to the abolitionist, or anti-slavery, cause in the US, and she created one of the most iconic and enduring novels in American literature.”Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was not intended to become a full-length novel, but its huge popularity led a publisher to contact Stowe and convince her to expand it.
Though already an active abolitionist, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was the impetus for Stowe to write the novel, which became a symbol of the power of literature in social reform. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and was only outsold by the Bible.
15. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
Author: by Anna Deavere Smith
Anchor
English
265 pages
From acclaimed playwright Anna Deavere Smith, a captivating work of dramatic literature and a unique first-person portrait of a pivotal moment in American history: the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Twilight is a stunning work of “documentary theater” that explores the devastating human impact of the five days of riots following the Rodney King verdict.
From nine months of interviews with more than two hundred people, Smith has chosen the voices that best reflect the diversity and tension of a city in turmoil: a disabled Korean man, a white male Hollywood talent agent, a Panamanian immigrant mother, a teenage black gang member, a macho Mexican-American artist, Rodney King’s aunt, beaten truck driver Reginald Denny, former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, and other witnesses, participants, and victims.
A work that goes directly to the heart of the issues of race and class, Twilight ruthlessly probes the language and the lives of its subjects, offering stark insight into the complex and pressing social, economic, and political issues that fueled the flames in the wake of the Rodney King verdict and ignited a conversation about policing and race that continues today.
16. Up Against the Wind: Chasing David Wiley
Author: by David Wyley Long
B097SRZHHB
English
187 pages
Spanning over 40 years, UP AGAINST THE WIND is the inspirational journey of a black boy, born in Newark, New Jersey, to the streets of Detroit, Brooklyn and Nashville. David Wyley Long tackles life with raw honesty and with enduring pain, as he speaks through his continual struggles of learning life, love, heartbreak and more.
His journey ends in Christiansted, Saint Croix where he finally discovers his life’s purpose and overcomes life’s multiple challenges, while realizing he was running throughout life with his eyes closed.
