Younger
Drama. 4W, 3M. In this imagined prequel to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, we journey with the Younger family matriarch, Lena, from Jackson, Mississippi to Chicago during the Great Migration. When she reunites with Walter, Sr., she finds that life in the North is not as they thought it would be. Will they be able to hold steadfast to their dreams and each other, or will the harsh realities of a new place get the best of them?
Younger was accepted into the 2023 Flint Repertory Theatre New Works Festival, which was held in Flint, Michigan from April 28-May 1, 2023. It had a reading at Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre in Atlanta, Feb. 18-20, 2022. Listen to my interview on NPR station WABE about the show.
Other Paths to God
Mystery/Dark Comedy. 4W 1NB. When I started writing this play I said I wanted it to feel like an episode of “Scandal.” A group of ICU nurses find themselves becoming the scapegoats when grant money goes missing at Morey Medical Center. Will they come together to free each other, or will they be swallowed by a system that’s looking for someone to blame? It’s a wild ride.
This play was commissioned as a part of the New Georgia Woman Project: Black Women Speak initiative, sponsored by Horizon Theatre Company and the National New Play Network. The program aims to develop new plays by nine Black women playwrights in the South. Public readings will be held in 2024.
THE RECONSTRUCTION TRILOGY
The Reconstruction Trilogy consists of three plays set in post-Civil War Georgia. The plays explore the three areas that freed Black people nurtured in order to establish community after Emancipation: the family, sovereignty and economic mobility.
The Wash
Comedy. 7W. In 1881, Black laundresses in Atlanta led a strike weeks before the International Cotton Exposition came to town. Demanding $1/week, the Atlanta Washerwomen’s Strike of 1881 was the first successful interracial, organized labor strike of the post-Civil War era. The Wash offers an intimate and often funny look at ordinary women who went from workers to fighters– and won.
The Vote
Drama. 5W, 7M. Reverend Campbell McNeal is in the fight of his life, running for a Senate seat in Georgia’s first state legislature since before the Civil War. President Grant has sent an ambitious group of men from the North to help with his election, but a mysterious young woman may be the opponent he never saw coming. Loosely based on the real lives of Tunis Campbell and Henry McNeal Turner, this new drama shows the real cost of the vote.
The Knot
Romantic Comedy. 2M, 2W. What does it mean to love someone without bondage and obligation? After leaving their plantation, Flex and CeCe settle in a community of free Black people in South Georgia. With the world at their fingertips, they must decide whether they still want each other on this side of freedom.