Fathers and Sons
Play Description
Marcus, his father Leon, and grandfather Bernard confront a history of absence, mistakes, mistrust, and broken promises as they strive to redefine themselves as fathers and sons.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“FATHERS AND SONS contains many pungent exchanges, and a meaningful subject: the estrangement of fathers and sons through several generations of African-American men and how it might be healed. The omnipresent phantom Benard Goodwater is the bad daddy incarnate — a trumpet-toting, be-bopping ne’er-do-well, who serves as a jive Greek chorus. He was clearly a lousy father to his haunted son Leon. And Leon returned the disfavor to his own offspring Marcus, by becoming a coke-sniffing, child-neglecting womanizer himself. In FATHERS AND SONS, the two living relations, and the ghostly one, confront one another during a family crisis … Bradford’s dialogue can sizzle and sting, and he exhibits a real flair for sexy romantic banter. That gift is exploited in the more intimate, sensuous scenes … Clearly, the playwright wants to explore how a man like Marcus can overcome a legacy of parental neglect and misogyny to forge a committed marriage — and maybe even a reconciliation with his father.” —Misha Berson, Seattle Times
Author(s)
Michael BradfordMichael Bradford is an award-winning director and professor of dramatic arts at the University of Connecticut. Bradford's work has been produced Off-Broadway at the American Place Theatre, and elsewhere in New York at the Lark Developmental Theatre, The Flea, The Access and the NADA Theatre. Regionally he has been produced at the Lorna Littleway Theatre, Louisville, KY and ETA Creative Theatre, Chicago, IL. He has received the Manhattan Theatre Club Playwright fellowship, the LARK Theatre Writers Residency and the New York Stage and Film Residency, New York. His plays have received readings and work-shops at the Manhattan Theatre Club, LARK Theatre, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Connecticut Repertory Theatre, the Steppenwolf Theatre and the Actors Theatre of Louisville. His play, LIVING IN THE WIND, received over ten AUDELCO Theatre award nominations, and WILLY'S CUT AND SHINE was recently published by Broadway Play Publishing Inc and produced at the ETA Creative Theatre, Chicago, Il.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 6/5/2017 |
| Pages | 60 |
| ISBN | 9780881454208 |
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:
World Premiere by A Contemporary Theatre, Seattle, WA, in 2008
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
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. GULLIVER REDUX explores what happens to Lemuel Louis Gulliver when he is not elected president. He goes into seclusion and winds up in the poorest country in the world, which has a dictator for life, but is led back to his origins, Chicago's Great South Side and into a confrontation at the Million Men and Women Convocation March.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
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
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
TELL PHARAOH is the story of Harlem, our nation's foremost black community.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A passionate retelling of the Daniel Bell incident, in which a black man was shot and killed while running from police officers.
Production Info
Cast: 20 total (5 female, 15 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play 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
$15.00–$15.95Play 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
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Described by the New York Times as “a threatening portrait of urban insanity. A drug lord is king, corruption is endemic and parents instill offspring with perverse values. In Mr Brown’s Coney Island, everything is for sale.”
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 125 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
1963. Jackson, Mississippi. Robert-Earl Monroe wants Civil Rights Activist Medgar Evers off his once quiet street. But his plans are jeopardized when his sixteen-year-old daughter, Robbie, returns home from jail, newly politicized and eager to stand on the front lines of the Movement. Act Two jumps back in time to 1959, to the last time Medgar Evers set foot in the Monroe household for Robbie's 13th birthday. Battle lines are drawn — daughter against father, husband against wife, sister against sister, and neighbor against neighbor. MISSISSIPPI examines the tensions and complications within families and among neighbors in the years leading up to the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male, doubling)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
A PREFACE TO THE ALIEN GARDEN takes a hard look at the gangsta lifestyle in present-day Kansas City.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
An African American college professor who is feeling stuck both in his life and in his world of words meets a female African American student who comes to represent for him a dangerous kind of renewal and redemption, one that leads to tragedy for two disparate families.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 115 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes