courtesy of Main Street Theater
…And L.A. Is Burning
Play Description
A tender, quirky play about two white women and a black man living in Seattle in 1992, as the nation and the media are transfixed by the trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused in the beating of Rodney King and the outcry of protest after the verdicts.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“… [an] unassuming gem … A comedy with serious implications, Y York’s neatly crafted play explores the impact of preconception and miscommunication upon a Seattle Environmental Protection Agency office worker, her black colleague and her new neighbor, an East Coast visitor researching a book on ‘hidden prejudice’ in America. The action unfolds in 1992, with the media dominated by the trial of Los Angeles police officers for beating Rodney King and the subsequent riots after the ‘not guilty’ verdict. Yet while that is the backdrop, the play is so low-key it would be easy to overlook just how much it has to say and how well it says it. Though treating weighty issues, York doesn’t clobber you with them, instead maintaining a light touch. While her theme may be familiar, she has found a fresh and individual approach to it. Best of all, by accurately capturing the quirks of human attitudes and interplay, York keeps the play consistently funny, unflaggingly true and, at times, surprisingly touching. The central factor in its success is a memorable protagonist: the unglamorous, opinionated and outspoken Haddie. She’s the sort you’d instantly peg as a bit of an oddball, likely a loner: the type who blurts out opinions and random pronouncements; who offers unsolicited advice to strangers at the supermarket (‘buy this one, not that’); and who conducts long, heartfelt conversations with a pet fish in a plastic bag. She has taken as her own (and parrots) many notions she heard on T V or read somewhere, without thinking them through. Naturally, a lot of these ideas have a touch of paranoia about the inevitable ‘they’ who make all the world’s trouble. Haddie is eccentric, exasperating, yet so desperate to connect that she’s strangely endearing. Despite its early-’90s setting, this astutely observed play’s themes are absolutely relevant. York gets exactly the way many people view issues of race and class, how people adopt any overheard opinions that sound reasonable enough, how the ‘big story’ at any particular moment colors our everyday perceptions. AND L.A. IS BURNING makes you laugh, then leaves you with plenty to ponder and discuss.” —Everett Evans, Houston Chronicle
Author(s)
Y YorkY York's works include: LATE IN THE GAME, …AND LA IS BURNING (recipient of the 2008 Smith Prize from the National New Play Network), BLEACHERS IN THE SUN, FRAMED, THE GAME OF LIGHT, WOOF (Houston's Buzzy for best new play), IT COMES AROUND, KRISIT, THE NEW DARK CLARITY, THE SNOWFLAKE AVALANCHE, THE SECRET WIFE, GERALD'S GOOD IDEA, RAIN. SOME FISH. NO ELEPHANTS., THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF NOW, and numerous works for families. Y York's plays has been recognized with 2004 Hawai'i Award for Literature, the 1997 Berilla Kerr Award, and the New Dramatists' 1992 Joe Calloway Award. She has been supported by grants from TCG/Pew Charitable Trust, AT&T Onstage, King County Arts Commission (Washington), Seattle Arts Commission, and Artists Trust (Washington). Y York is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and an alumna member of New Dramatists.
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
Premiere at Main Street Theater, Houston
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
SINCE AFRICA chronicles the relationship between a Dinka refugee from Southern Sudan and three Americans — a North Shore socialite, her daughter, and an African American Deacon — who help him acclimate to Chicago’s unfamiliar urban surroundings. A look at American culture through the eyes of an African, this play explores the tensions between blacks and whites, Africans and African Americans, the devout and the non-religious.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00Play Description
Set in a black barbershop in Arkansas, 1955, WEST MEMPHIS MOJO sings the unsung heroes of the blues tradition. A young songwriter, working as a shoeshine boy, collaborates with the shop owner and a small-time recording artist to create new blues tunes. Amidst racial tensions and the politics of the white-owned music industry, this play explodes with the conflicts surrounding each character's pursuit of the American dream.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$0.00–$15.95Play Description
In 1950, in a small Southern town of Durham, Georgia, Louis, a prominent black businessman, is murdered in the middle of the street. The regulars inside Willy's Cut and Shine Barbershop all witness the murder and watch the murderer casually stroll to his car. The question among the men in the shop, the dead man's brother, the elders, and the young men just returning from World War II, is what is to be done. To this we add a Sheriff who abdicates responsibility, a young gambling junkie back home from Chicago, ghosts from the battlefields of France and Germany, a murderer who wants more than the dead man's blood, and the possibility of a soul's redemption or destruction. At the end of this drama, every character must decide what they are willing to do to see another sunrise.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (9 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Race and science collide in Cassandra Medley’s trenchant drama. Claire is a melanin scientist. She believes people of color are genetically superior — physically, mentally, in every way. Her daughter Kalima, a molecular geneticist at Johns Hopkins, knows otherwise, but to discredit her mother would destroy the relationship that each woman values the most. Forced to choose between science and family, between her future and her family, Kalima must decide where her loyalties lie.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
In the future, after the global ecological disaster, so much that makes life worth living has been outlawed. One family refuses to submit. Will their small act of rebellion lead to a future where science no longer dominates humanity but serves it?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (4 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00Play Description
T’Wana Jepson has been bit before. And scratched. And kicked. And punched. And called every dirty word in the book. But so has her coworker and play mama, Miss Georgia. It comes with the territory as a nurse’s aide caring for patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia. You learn to not take it personal and to lean on your co-workers for support. But after T’Wana is attacked by the patient in E 204, something happens that threatens the bonds of trust and friendship.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (3 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Tech whiz kid Eddie Fisker joins forces with a new technology leader to create what amounts to a billion dollar house of cards. Surrounded by corporations that remember books as “little paper websites” and remind each other of various characters from the Muppets, the two try to survive the shockwaves, real and imagined, that threaten to topple their new product’s success.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Subtitled “a light and dark skin comedy,” CHIAROSCURO is set on a cruise ship peopled by black singles where “pretty” means light-skinned, and all the men are dark, and Papa Legba, the African trickster spirit, is disguised as a ship steward.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
THE GULLIVER TRILOGY presents the adventures of its hero, Lemuel Louis Gulliver, Citizen Candidate of the World, an extraordinary everyman, whose picaresque life begins in 1942 on Chicago's great South Side. Among the issues addressed in LEMUEL are racial segregation, quality of education, assassination of American leaders, abuse of political power, and the needs of the poor and oppressed.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
In NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY a black bartender in New York City attempts to outwit a white mobster syndicate. The play received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Charles Gordone’s Pulitzer signified two firsts: he was the first African American playwright to receive a Pulitzer, and NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY was the first Off-Broadway play to receive the Pulitzer.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (5 female, 11 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes