Staging Black Protest: A Play List by Lisa B. Thompson

Staging Black Protest: A Play Listby Lisa B. Thompson | @DrLisaBThompson | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Black people are experiencing great turmoil. Millions have taken to the streets for a week to protest in the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others murdered by state sanctioned violence. As a playwright and professor who specializes in African American theatre and cultural studies, I’ve been thinking about the ways I can help us understand this moment. In times of strife scholars often provide a syllabus or reading list to educate the public, but plays are rarely included. Yet Black dramatists have long used theatre as a social weapon. 
Although the stages are dark on and off Broadway and in many of our local communities due to Covid-19, I urge people to turn to Black theatre to contextualize this current moment. While this list is not exhaustive, I’ve included classics as well as more contemporary plays that explore Black resistance from a variety of vantage points. These plays can be read alone or performed virtually with friends and family. In difficult times like these I find great solace and inspiration in the words and magic of Black theatre. Gather your people and share this magic. 
Alice Childress, Wine in the Wilderness (1969)
Brian Freeman, Civil Sex (2000)
Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel (1916)
Katori Hall, The Mountaintop (2009)

















LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, The Slave (1964)


















Dominique Morisseau, Detroit '67 (2013)


















Robert O’Hara, Insurrection: Holding History (1996)


















Nikkole Salter, Repairing a Nation (2001)
Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (1992)
Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993)


















Roger Guenveur Smith, A Huey P. Newton Story (2001)
Jeff Stetson, The Meeting (1987)
Douglas Turner Ward, A Day of Absence (1965)
August Wilson, Two Trains Running (1990)



















Tracy Scott-Wilson, The Good Negro (2009)
*For an excellent exploration of protest theater see Harry J. Elam Jr.’s Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (University of Michigan Press, 1997).

+++ Lisa B. Thompson is professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the forthcoming play collection, Underground, Monroe, and The Mamalogues: Three Plays.