Speaker’s Head
This play is included in the collection:
Play Description
A speaker introduces his concepts on America's “eminent world domain.”
Production Info
Cast: 1 total (1 male)Short Drama (about 10 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“…there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman. Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays. Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium.” —Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
Author(s)
Aishah RahmanAishah Rahman was born in Harlem on November 4, 1936 and died December 29, 2014 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. An accomplished playwright and author, Aishah was a Professor of Literary Arts and taught at Brown from 1992 – 2011. A graduate of Howard University and Goddard College, Rahman, along with Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and others was active in the 1960's Black Arts Movement. She described her writing as adhering to a "jazz aesthetic" and was the author of numerous plays, including the dramas UNFINISHED WOMEN CRY IN NO MAN'S LAND WHILE A BIRD DIES IN GILDED CAGE, THE MOJO AND THE SAYSO, ONLY IN AMERICA, CHIAROSCURO and three plays with music, LADY DAY A MUSICAL TRAGEDY, THE TALE OF MADAME ZORA and HAS ANYBODY SEEN MARIE LAVEAU? Her plays were produced at the Public Theatre, Ensemble Theatre, BAM and theaters and universities across the United States. She served as director of playwriting at the New Federal Theater in New York. Among her numerous fellowships, grants and awards are a special citation from the Rockefeller Foundation of the Arts for dedication to playwriting in the American Theater. Her plays are distributed by Broadway Play Publishing. Chewed Water: A Memoir, the story of growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and '50s, was published in 2001 by University of New England Press.
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:
First produced by Perishable Theater, Providence RI
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
Opal meets a drunk tramp named Psyche on the bus. He strikes up a conversation, and at first she’s very wary of him. But gradually Psyche’s penetrating insights begin both to unnerve and intrigue Opal. Does she know him? Has she always known him?
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (1 female, 1 male, plus 1 musician)Short Drama (about 25 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$100.00 Play Description
History like you’ve never experienced it before. As a musical. You’re gonna laugh like it’s 1499, and the music will knock you out!
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (1 female, 2 male, or any combination of males and females and number of actors)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Bryan Prize for Drama by the Fellowship of Southern Writers
Play Description
A dark comedy about the rescue of a mute bodybuilder from the gritty streets of New Orleans by a couple of drag queens, which brings out the best and worst in them.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$100.00 Play Description
Three gay actors find themselves on a stage. They have no idea how they got there or why they are there. They find a copy of THE THREE SISTERS — in Russian. One of them can read Russian so he begins to translate the play, and each of them starts to act out the part of one of the sisters.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (5 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$35.00 Play Description
A fast-paced musical comedy in which a cast of five Dickens devotees bring hundreds of his best-loved characters to life in 90 minutes of madcap Dickensian mayhem. From Great Expectations complete with flaming bride, to A Christmas Carol in which Tiny Tim rocks the house with a soaring electric guitar solo, DICKENS (ABRIDGED) also features scenes from David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (5 female, 5 male, or any combination of males and females totaling 5)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$100.00 Play Description
This wonderful musical is a history of America's pioneers as they push their way across the country. Like the musical QUILTERS, which it pre-dated, it too uses the theme of weaving the strands of our history into a coherent whole.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (8 female, 8 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.95 Play Description
Both a riff on lounge acts and a lounge act itself. Time Out calls the show, “Enveloping, sad and entirely hilarious, the most fun you’ll ever have watching the American Dream disintegrate.”
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (1 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
BUBBLING BROWN SUGAR tells the story of Harlem in its Golden Years. Taking many of the great songs from the era, Loften Mitchell weaves an ebullient tale of a time gone by. This musical, which started a whole wave of Broadway shows by and about black composers, had its beginnings at Rosetta LeNoire's Amas Rep. It then moved on to a lengthy run on Broadway, London's West End, and both national and European tours.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (6 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$100.00 Play Description
A loving homage to Eugène Labiche and the High Vaudeville style he was instrumental in establishing a century and a half ago.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Comedy (about 105 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
$15.00–$100.00 Play Description
In Eric Overmyer's hilarious send-up of private-eye pulp fiction, Shrimp Bucket and his brother, Gut, are stealing the sexy Dolores Con Leche's dreams. It's Taxi's task to find out why. From the ubiquitous fog to the cheap bedrooms at Heartbreak Hotel to Con Leche's legs, which are described as “gams that could raise goose flesh on a tossed salad,” IN A PIG'S VALISE pokes fun at and pays homage to the hardboiled detective novels we all know and love.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes