Black Thunder: An Anthology of African-American Drama - Softcover

Amiri Baraka; August Wilson; George C. Wolfe; Leslie Lee; Steve Carter; P. J. Gibson; Alexander Smmons; Ed Bullins

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451628446 ISBN 13: 9780451628442

Publisher: Signet, 1992

Synopsis

An anthology of African American plays features Ed Bullins's The Taking of Miss Jane, George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, and August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Original.

About this title

About the Author:

August Wilson is a major American playwright whose work has been consistently acclaimed as among the finest of the American theater. His first play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best new play of 1984-85. His second play, Fences, won numerous awards for best play of the year, 1987, including the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, his third play, was also voted best play of 1987-88 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. In 1990, Wilson was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson.

From Publishers Weekly:

Given the ferment in black theater since 1975, the period covered by this nine-play anthology, the offerings here are disappointing. The opening and closing plays, George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum and August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom , are by far the best works included, the former a coruscating attack on the cliches of black popular culture, the latter a taut examination of the dynamics of a group of black musicians in the late 1920s. What comes in between alternates between family melodramas derivative of O'Neill and Lorraine Hansberry (Steve Carter's Eden ; Leslie Lee's The First Breeze of Summer ) and failed avant-gardism redolent of the Off-Broadway of the early 1960s ( General Hag's Skeezag by Amiri Baraka and The Taking of Miss Janie by Ed Bullins). At their worst, several of the plays here offer casual anti-Semitism (the Baraka and, in a more guarded context, the Bullins) or vicious homophobia (P. J. Gibson's messy Long Time Since Yesterday ) . Playwright Branch's introduction begins promisingly, with an account of the first African American theater ventures, but quickly degenerates into a catalogue of titles and dates.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Signet
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0451628446
• ISBN 13: 9780451628442
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496
• Editor: William B. Branch