Nativity / In Lockdown with Brecht is a moving collection of poems on many modern themes, including globalisation, hopes invested in the next generation, our guilt concerning the terrors of their inheritance, love, comradeship, mental stress and troublesome romance, but often with a light and elaborate touch. Each poem invokes a contemporary experience of the world that will resonate with a wide range of readers. Nativity / In Lockdown with Brecht makes demands of the reader that will be repaid in new perspectives on and ways of feeling about the world today and in the foreseeable future. It also employs humour, satire and a sense of the absurd at times.
Nativity / In Lockdown with Brecht is a moving collection of poems on many modern themes, including globalisation, hopes invested in the next generation, our guilt concerning the terrors of their inheritance, love, comradeship, mental stress and troublesome romance, but often with a light and elaborate touch. Each poem invokes a contemporary experience of the world that will resonate with a wide range of readers. Nativity / In Lockdown with Brecht makes demands of the reader that will be repaid in new perspectives on and ways of feeling about the world today and in the foreseeable future. It also employs humour, satire and a sense of the absurd at times.
“A masterpiece . . . Trouble in Mind still contains astonishing power; it could have been written yesterday.” —Vulture Ahead of its time, Trouble in Mind, written in 1955, follows the rehearsal process of an anti-lynching play preparing for its Broadway debut. When Wiletta, a Black actress and veteran of the stage, challenges the play’s stereotypical portrayal of the Black characters, unsettling biases come to the forefront and reveal the ways so-called progressive art can be used to uphold racist attitudes. Scheduled to open on Broadway in 1957, Childress objected to the requested changes in the script that would “sanitize” the play for mainstream audiences, and the production was canceled as a result. Childress’s final script is published here with an essay by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, editor of TCG Illuminations.
Set in 1955, in the redwood country north of San Francisco. Bulrusher is the name given to a baby girl found floating in a basket on the river. As the girl grows up she develops a gift for clairvoyance that makes her feel isolated until a new girl moves into town.
Inspired by the writings of Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), The Late Wedding is a fractured portrait of a fractured marriage, as told through a series of interconnected fables, including an anthropological tour of fantastical tribes and their marital customs. Christopher Chen's winking second-person narrative, delivered by a six-person shape-shifting cast, deftly guides you on a wild and delightful examination of love and longing. At once an anthropological tour through marriage customs, a spy thriller, and a sci-fi love story, the mind-bending The Late Wedding is an inventive and surprising theatrical experience. "Wild, witty... contemplative and poignant... you gotta see this funny, brilliant play." - San Francisco Examiner "A seductive play... a fascinating little gem... a script about the mystery and challenges of love, in all its permutations. The play is a provocative one-act composed with a unique theatrical structure... a swirling nebula of magical notions put down in a contemporary world." - DC Metro Theatre Arts "A comic, dramatic inquiry into human relationships - between lovers or spouses; between playwright and audience - [The Late Wedding] is another of Chen's slyly metatheatrical, blissfully funny, whiplash-smart creations... What begins as a look at anthropological research into the marital arrangements and lore of a few odd tribes segues without warning into a political drama cum action thriller." - SF Gate "Bold and brainy... As The Late Wedding dips in and out of such genres as the spy caper and science fiction... it blurs the boundaries between its two strands of Calvino homage, so that the genre-sampling meta-theater begins to reflect on the bittersweet realities of marriage." - The Washington Post "[The Late Wedding] is about the vagaries of love and marriage, both homo- and heterosexual, and the way that we both cherish and distort the past, and about the creative process itself... you gotta see this funny, brilliant play." - San Francisco Examiner
Argues that contemporary black dramas use the slave past to complicate views of the history of slavery, of the realities of racial progress, and of black subjectivity.
