On Seattle stages, Black women playwrights speak for themselves
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And it is not only the number of these plays that is noteworthy. It is the diversity of themes, the intriguing subject matter and the striking aesthetic multiplicity in how stories are told. (The trend also is attracting gifted Black actors to Seattle — including Lamar Legend, Shaunyce Omar and Aishé Keita — and giving them reason to stay here awhile.) “Historically, there are these kinds of surges that have come out of the Black female experience,” says Valerie Curtis-Newton, a leading Seattle director and University of Washington drama professor who has been championing Black women playwrights here for over two decades. “In the 1980s, it happened in fiction with novelists like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and others. Part of this trend is that women are rising up in general, and having more to say about the world we live in.” And people are listening. Consider ACT Theatre’s recent staging of Pass Over , by Antoinette Nwandu, a gut punch of an homage to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting Godot , transferred to a gritty urban corner where two young, Black, homeless men hang out in an absurdist void ringed by trigger-happy, racist cops. The production earned full houses, and three […]
