Plays

With Trilogy of Resistance, the political philosopher Antonio Negri extends his intervention in contemporary politics and culture into a new medium: drama. The three plays collected for the first time in this volume dramatize the central concepts of the innovative and influential thought he has articulated in his best-selling books Empire and Multitude, coauthored with Michael Hardt.

In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, Negri’s political dramas are designed to provoke debate around the fundamental questions they raise about resistance, violence, and tyranny. In Swarm, the protagonist searches for an effective mode of activism; with the help of a Greek-style chorus, she tries on different roles, from the suicide bomber and party apparatchik to the multitude. The Bent Man, set in fascist Italy, focuses on a woodcutter who resists fascism by bending himself in two and using his own now-twisted body as a weapon against war. In Cithaeron, perhaps the most audacious of the three plays, Negri reworks Euripides’s Bacchae to explore the circumstances that would compel a diverse and creative community to withdraw from both the despotic government that constrains it and the traditional family relationships that reinforce that despotism.

First published in France in 2009 and featuring an introduction by Negri, Trilogy of Resistance provides a direct and passionate distillation of Negri’s concepts and offers insights into one of the most important projects in political philosophy currently under way, as well as a timely reminder of the power of theater to effectively dramatize complex and challenging ideas.

“The play nicely combines Pinterian menace with caustic political commentary.” –Time

“Acerbic, elusive, poetic and chilling, the writing is demanding in a rarefied manner. Its implications are both affecting and disturbing.” –Los Angeles Times

“In his exquisitely written dramatic lament for the decline of high culture. . . . [Shawn] offers a definition of the self that should rattle the defenses of intellectual snobs everywhere.” –The New York Times

Writer and performer Wallace Shawn’s landmark 1996 play features three characters—a respected poet, his daughter, and her English-professor husband—suspected of subversion in a world where culture has come under the control of the ruling oligarchy. Told through three interwoven monologues, the Orwellian political story is recounted alongside the visceral dissolution of a marriage. The play debuted at the Royal National Theatre in London, in a production directed by David Hare, who also directed the film version, starring Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson. The play’s subsequent New York premiere was staged in a long-abandoned men’s club in lower Manhattan, directed by Shawn’s longtime collaborator André Gregory.

Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with André. His most recent play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, premiered last year in London.

Sonia Sanchez is a prolific, award-winning poet and one of the most prominent writers in the Black Arts movement. This collection brings her plays together in one volume for the first time. Like her poetry, Sanchez’s plays voice her critique of the racism and sexism that she encountered as a young female writer in the black militant community in the late 1960s and early 1970s, her ongoing concern with the well-being of the black community, and her commitment to social justice. In addition to The Bronx Is Next (1968), Sister Son/ji (1969), Dirty Hearts (1971), Malcolm/Man Don’t Live Here No Mo (1972), and Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us? (1974), this collection includes the never-before-published dramas I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t (1982) and 2 X 2 (2009), as well as three essays in which Sanchez reflects on her art and activism. Jacqueline Wood’s introduction illuminates Sanchez’s stagecraft in relation to her poetry and advocacy for social change, and the feminist dramatic voice in black revolutionary art.

Welcome to the spoken world / Unspoken heard / Unfocused blurred / A bird of youth / A sooth / A truth / A muse of mind / You are divine / Feel me?—Marc Bamuthi Joseph, from Word Becomes Flesh

Works by the most exciting and influential hip-hop theater artists of today, young performers from across the United States and London who are mixing music, movement, rap, spoken word, and visual design to create an entirely new theater. As described by Harry J. Elam Jr., a leading scholar in the field: “This is a theater that in its form and content recycles elements from the past, but with a new spirit of possibility and a new urgency that speaks to the racial and cultural hybrid of today.”
 
The stars in the Boom Box Galaxy are: Carl Hancock Rux (Brooklyn, New York), Will Power (Beacon, New York), Marc Bamuthi Joseph (San Francisco, California), Psalmayene 24 (Silver Springs, Maryland), Jake Ann Jones (New York, New York), Zell Miller III (Austin, Texas), Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd (San Francisco, California), Jonzi D (London, England), Cristal Chanelle Truscott (Atlanta, Georgia), and Aya de Leon (Oakland, California). 

"In the Blood is an extraordinary new play…It is truly harrowing…we cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron.’"—Margo Jefferson, The New York Times

The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, New York Observer and Vogue]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A.

Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children—"my treasures, my five joys"—who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available—abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her.

These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.

Suzan Lori-Parks is also the author of The America Play and Other Works and Venus, both published by TCG. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Five Lesbian Brothers are not only gaspingly hilarious and blithely subversive, they are fully capable of creating characters named Dawn, Patty and Peaches. Their work travels from the Pygo Moon System to the elite Tilue-Pussenheimer Academy to my favorite town in all world literature-Big Bone, Oregon. Reading The Brothers' plays is addictive, although I am told that the group will come to your home and perform them. But be prepared: these women are sexy, silly and homicidal, and they chug-a-lug SlimFast. You need them. -Paul Rudnick

The first collection of plays by The Five Lesbian Brothers includes:

Voyage to Lesbos "The action is in Lesbos, Illinois, and the occasion of Bonnie's wedding day, when five mysteriously intertwined women ostensibly prepare for the golden event, while their every action works to sabotage it."-Lisa Kron

Brave Smiles...another lesbian tragedy "This play is a reflection of love. This one in particular manifests what we love about being Brothers and what we love about being lesbians: the tragedy of it all which can be so bitingly and relentlessly funny sometimes." -Maureen Angelos

The Secretaries "What happens when someone new comes into a tight group? This is how Patty Johnson was born. Susan Curtis was born when Dominique was being interrogated in an improv exercise. Ashley Elizabeth Fratangello was an homage to Elizabeth Ashley. We were obsessed with her SlimFast campaign at the time. Needless to say it permeates the script." -Peg Healey

Brides of the Moon "We had all reached a point where we could forgive our mothers for their fucked-up lives and accept them for themselves and for doing the best they could against insurmountable odds. We created a worldwide corporation to represent those odds and a woman who had at one time been a promising astronaut, but because of her integrity had ruined any chance she might have had to advance her career. The evil corporation has her "consciousness lowered" to get her out of the way." -Babs Davy

The Five Lesbian Brothers are Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron. They came together as an acting company in 1989 after performing together in various other com

Latest plays by the author of The Baltimore Waltz.