- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“Victory Gardens Theater did not simply present a world premiere of a new play on Thursday night. It conjured a new life for a myth that is more than 2,000 years old. And it did so with such stunning and completely realized theatricality that it seemed as if all the talent involved in the project has suddenly ripened and burst apart. The play is called PECONG. And although at first its Caribbean island setting seems far from the ancient Greece as a globe will permit, it turns out to be not just one of the most astonishingly powerful retellings of the Medea story, but one of the most faithful. In moving this classic tale of sexual possession and bloody revenge to another continent, playwright Steve Carter has rediscovered its meaning. Sex and power are the focus of PECONG, and the struggles come in all varieties. At the center there is the battle between man and woman in the ferocious relationship of Mediyah (the Medea character), the sorceress, and Jason Allcock, the shallow womanizer whom she falls madly in love with and cedes all her power to, only to be crassly dumped. Hell hath no fury like this woman scorned. But there are also wars among women, between brother and sister, between those of light and dark skin tones and, of course, among men. (In the Carnival scene a ‘pecong,’ or verbal battle of insults hurled in rhymed verse, is played out in great style by Mediyah’s brother, dressed as a rooster, and her lover, dressed as a ram.) PECONG is Carter’s most ambitious and beautifully written play to date — full of humor, passion, high drama and low comedy.” —Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
Author(s)
Steve CarterHorace E. "Steve" Carter, Jr. is an American playwright, best known for his plays involving Caribbean immigrants living in the United States. Mr. Carter received the Living Legend award at the 2001 National Black Theatre Festival. He was Victory Gardens Theater's first playwright-in-residence beginning in 1981 and has also served as playwright-in-residence at George Mason University. Carter's PECONG (winner of the Joseph Jefferson award for New Work) premiered at Victory Gardens in the 1989 – 1990 season and received subsequent productions at London's Tricycle Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and Newark Symphony Hall. His plays EDEN (winner of an Outer Critics Circle award, an Audelco award, and the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award ) and NEVIS MOUNTAIN DEW received Midwest premieres, and DAME LORRAINE, HOUSE OF SHADOWS, SHOOT ME WHILE I'M HAPPY, SPIELE '36 OR THE FOURTH MEDAL and ROOT CAUSES all premiered at Victory Gardens.
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:
Originally produced by the Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago
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
Trapped by a storm in the office of the environmental organization for which they work, Antony and Janna find that their views on race and the environment have the power to send them back in time to discover how closely related they really are.
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (1 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 75 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Two baby-faced would-be criminals decide to rob the home of two women of advanced age who live in contention with their past, their present, their future, and each other. The brats get more than they’ve bargained for, including possible great futures behind bars in Joliet.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male, 2 children)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Picton and Dorcas, ancient now, came to this country with an internal, eternal love that made them blind to the fact that the darker aspects of the elusive Dame Lorraine found homes in the hearts of their eight sons. Their first-born and only surviving male child comes home today after twenty-seven years in prison. Picton and Dorcas await him, thinking perhaps they should never have come here. Perhaps they never should have fallen in love.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 75 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play 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
$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
UNFINISHED WOMEN deals with the events in a home for unwed mothers on the last day of jazz musician Charlie Parker’s life, March 12, 1955. The play digs beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teenage mothers.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (7 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
At his funeral, Eustace Baylor and his two families examine the tattered cloth of their lives. They find that if you would take one last look, you should take one first look.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (7 female, 4 male)Short Drama (about 30 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$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
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
On the docks of late 18th-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. When a chance encounter triggers an unexpected collision of worlds, painful truths are uncovered, and the brutality of past crimes spills into the next generation.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period 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
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
On the night in 1939 when Count Basie is to be the first black performer at the Palomar Ballroom next door, a pair of Bimini Baths attendants are tasked with cleaning up a stranger fished out of the La Brea Tar Pits.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (3 male)Full Length Drama (about 60 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes