The official blog of the Dramaturgy Department at Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE. For posts related to our current and upcoming shows, click the links to the right. Alternatively, you could begin at the beginning, and explore our posts in chronological order.
Apropos of centerstage’s Raisin Cycle, both Clybourne Park & Beneatha’s Place, comes this juicy bit of current events.
In honor of our RAISIN CYCLE plays and the conversation they knit around the palimpsest of RAISIN IN THE SUN, check out this marvelous instance of textual “riffing.”
(via egoetschius)
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
“Let American Be America Again” by Langston Hughes
- prepping lobby quotes for the RAISIN CYCLE, rep productions of Clybourne Park and the world premiere of Beneatha’s Place.
Transcript from episode 1 (of 3) in a brilliant series of conversations & videos from California Newsreel. Well worth the perusal. Here, they’re informing the conversation around upcoming Raisin Cycle.
A short reflection on Chicago’s historic bungalows - in light of RAISIN IN THE SUN, CLYBOURNE PARK, and BENEATHA’S PLACE (collectively the RAISIN CYCLE at CENTERSTAGE). #CSRaisin
Hansberry family house, Chicago’s South Side; source of conflict, center of legal battles, and inspiration for A RAISIN IN THE SUN. Fitting sign.
1960 demographic map of Chicago, against which take place RAISIN IN THE SUN, CLYBOURNE PARK, and BENEATHA’S PLACE, the 3 pieces of #CSRaisin RAISIN CYCLE at centerstage.
Yea, I was the youngest playwright with a B’way opening ever and the 1st Black woman; what about it?
March 11 will bring the anniversary of the NYC premiere of A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1959), and one of those days that changed theater forever.
Exciting to be gearing up for #CSRaisin here with not one but TWO response plays.
Fun with White Privilege, as we get ready to start rehearsals Monday for #CSRaisin. That would be rep cast productions of Norris’ CLYBOURNE PARK and Kwei-Armah’s brand new BENEATHA’S PLACE, both alternative responses in conversation with Hansberrry’s gorgeous original classic, RAISIN IN THE SUN. So there.
“NOW, I’m not proud of what I did,” my friend Donna said the other day, her voice dropping to a low, confessional register.
Donna is black, in her late 40s and a graphic designer. Three generations of her family owned a Victorian row house in Washington until a probate dispute a while back forced them to rent in the Maryland suburbs. Driving home from work in the city recently, she took a shortcut through the alley where she frolicked in her youth, but which she now barely recognized, with its three-story decks and Zen gardens that led onto sidewalks freshly paved in red brick.
Donna tooted the horn at a parked car blocking her path. The car’s owner, a white woman, dawdled away in her garden nearby. With a blithe wave, the woman suggested a detour. Donna refused. She intended to wait her out, but then the words just tumbled out: “If you didn’t want to follow the rules, you shouldn’t have moved your white” — and here she used an expletive — “into D.C.!”
This is the rage, long simmering just beneath the surface, that is bubbling over now that Washington, the once-majority-black city immortalized in George Clinton’s 1975 funk classic “Chocolate City,” has lost its black majority. But even before the data corroborated that demographic milestone last year, Washington’s makeover had created something of an identity crisis.
(via Farewell to Chocolate City - NYTimes.com)
Photo: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
(via npr)
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies. So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it? Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it: Dudes. Imagine life here in the US - or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world - is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it? Okay:
In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
follow link to read more….
Michael Lind takes stock, 14 years after his original piece on “The Beige and the Black,” of the complex demographics and even more complex framing that continues to stir up the conversation in the US.
1998 piece by Michael Lind on the changing racial demography of America, and how we envision it.
“Apologies to Dracula, Werewolf, Frankenstein”: White Homeowners and Blockbusters in Postwar Chicago, by Amanda Irene Seligman
(click though image for article)
