The Struggle Continues: Robbie McCauley: Scripts, Essays, & Reflections

Description

As a playwright, director, and performer, Robbie McCauley has been an influential presence in the American avant-garde theatre for many decades. In her work, she consistently confronts uncomfortable truths about race and racism in America with a sharp eye for nuance and complexity, using the personal to extend into the universal by weaving her own family history into her narratives. By breaking down the traditional walls between performer and spectator, her plays encourage challenging and necessary dialogue about the ways race affects our social frameworks and individual lived experiences. In addition to containing the full text of McCauley's plays Sally's Rape, Indian Blood, Sugar, and Jazz 'n Class, this volume includes insightful introductions to each play as well as additional essays by McCauley and other leading writers and academics about her work and legacy.

Robbie McCauley is a playwright, director, and performer who has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad. Her play Sally's Rape won the 1991 Obie Award for Best New American Play and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance. Other notable works include Sugar, Indian Blood, Mississippi Freedom, Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White, The Other Weapon, and Quabbin Dance. McCauley is a recipient of the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance, and was selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow. Her work is widely anthologized, including the volumes Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics. Striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local whites and blacks, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston, and Los Angeles produced by The Arts Company. In 1998 her "Buffalo Project" is highlighted as one of "The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" by The Village Voice, a roster including work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage. Robbie McCauley has taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, Boston College, Emerson College, and New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

"[McCauley is] a skilled performer and raconteur who knows the subtle difference between speaking with -- rather than to or at -- her audience."-- "Boston Globe" "Robbie McCauley is a formidable actor, writer, and director. As a performer, she takes dramatic risks, exhibiting an almost palpable vulnerability, a terrific intelligence, a breathtaking range of emotions."-- "BOMB Magazine" "Over and over again, the 45-minute piece reveals sharp, new facets of American truths, truths we secretly hold to be self-evident, but never discuss, truths about racism and misogyny, oppression and history...Sally's Rape makes us start talking."-- "Village Voice"