Guest Blog by Terry Dwyer

When A Raisin in the Sun opened on March 11, 1959, Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black female playwright to have her play performed on Broadway. The play was nominated for four Tony Awards in 1960 including Best Play. However, it would take seventeen years for another Black female playwright to have her work appear on Broadway.

In 1976 Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf opened as a choreopoem, a new type of production featuring poetry, music, and choreography. It also earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. Since then, the work of other Black female playwrights has made it to the stage with greater frequency while contributing some of the finest dramatic work to Broadway and off-Broadway productions.

In 2002 Suzan Lori-Parks was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog / Underdog followed in 2009 by Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined.  Nottage subsequently became the first female playwright to twice win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with her 2017 award for Sweat.

The Legacy

Parks and Nottage continued a tradition of strong, female, Black voices in American theater that predates Hansberry. Zora Neale Hurston’s Colorstruck, an unproduced 1925 play, ranks as an early example of her later work exploring race and color. Alice Childress’s 1949 play Florence centered on working class life and interracial politics. The playwriting lineage from Hurston, Childress, Hansberry, and Shange continue in the work of Jackie Sibbles-Drury, Dominique Rosseau, and Anna Deavere Smith, among many others.

This past summer the Dramatists Guild celebrated Hansberry in its issue of The Dramatist focusing on art and activism. In a conversation between Lynn Nottage, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, and Lisa Kron the playwright as activist and Hansberry’s legacy was discussed. Nottage noted the cultural reckoning occurring post-COVID and the ensuing changes on Broadway as it addressed past harmful practices. The opportunities for Black writers, Nottage said, particularly for women, have increased.

I feel it’s my social responsibility to shine a light on areas that don’t get seen.

— Lynn Nottage

New work, new voices, and new audiences energize the theater.

Reclaiming the Past

Valetta Anderson, a talented and prolific Atlanta playwright, brings us another lens – a Black family in post-Civil War America. “She’ll Find Her Way Home” is a fictionalized account of the courtship of Martha and Isaiah Montgomery, the historical founders of the African-American town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Here we feel the history of Black post-Civil War families of color and their struggle to find their place in the aftermath of struggle.

Anderson’s play dares to delve into issues that have divided many African American families over the years–issues of status and skin color that represent prejudice among the victims of prejudice. For all that, She’ll Find Her Way Home portrays the intimacy, the family bonds, and the gentle humor that makes one glad to have visited with the inhabitants of Mound Bayou. (Copies of She’ll Find Her Way Home can be found at Blue Moon Plays, LLC.

Passing the Torch

Into that mix is Erika Renee Land’s poetic monologue PTSD & Me. Land is a poet, author, spoken word performer, and motivational speaker who addresses in verse her PTSD resulting from military service in Iraq. PTSD & Me combines humor with the horror of war while proceeding in a rhythmic and fast-paced session.

Not one, not two, but three deployments later, and I can’t sleep at night;
 So I count the sand grains that have blown through the door;
 Thinking to myself, when am I going to go home?
 Is it going to be when the adrenaline wears off?
 It never wears off.
Maybe it should right now.

— Erika Renee Land

In a 1959 radio interview Hansberry said that to create something universal the dramatic writer had to pay very great attention to the specific. This is exactly what Land has done in her often funny but riveting one-woman show. PTSD & Me is a script that chronicles personal pain, depression, and suicide attempts to eventually find healing in verse. Land’s ongoing quest to educate the public about PTSD is brilliantly achieved in her monologue play. In doing so she has provided audiences with an important piece of theater and contributed to the idea of artist as activist. PTSD & Me is a show audiences will not soon forget.

PTSD AND ME by Erika Renee Land can be purchased at Blue Moon Plays, LLC. Copies are available in print and downloadable PDFs.