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    From the Ashes: Six Solo Plays
    From the Ashes: Six Solo Plays
    From the Ashes: Six Solo Plays
    Ebook289 pages2 hours

    From the Ashes: Six Solo Plays

    By Shauntay Grant

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    About this ebook

    From the Ashes collects solo plays by Black Canadian women and womxn that together celebrate the hope, humour, and healing that can come after devastation and loss. From lighthearted comedies to heavy dramas, this anthology contains a multitude of stories on Blackness, love, motherhood, sexuality, trauma, racism, mythology, and more.

    In Georgeena by Djanet Sears, a bride speeds down the highway, struggling to make sense of what led her to that moment. In benu by d’bi.young anitafrika, a young woman faces motherhood while still coming to terms with her own motherlessness. Makambe K Simamba’s A Chitenge Story follows a young woman who travels to her native Zambia to find and confront the man who abused her as a child. Ngozi Paul’s The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely chronicles a woman throughout different stages of her life that relate to her sexual awakening. In The Sender by Cheryl Foggo, a woman working for a global racism-elimination project encounters some technical difficulties when someone unexpectedly objects to the project’s restrictions. And in Kalale Dalton-Lutale’s Crybaby, a young woman falls in love for the first time, which opens a well of questions about her identity.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateJun 20, 2023
    ISBN9780369104489
    From the Ashes: Six Solo Plays

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      Book preview

      From the Ashes - Shauntay Grant

      Cover: From The Ashes: Six Solo Plays. Edited by Shantay Grant. On the left hand side of the cover is a linocut-type illustration of a side-profile of a Black woman holding a plant. The plant's stem is a fountain pen with leaves growing off it. At the top of the pen/stem is an explosion of red that looks like fire.

      Also by Shauntay Grant

      The Bridge

      From The

      Ashes

      Six

      Solo

      Plays

      Edited by

      Shauntay Grant

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      Copyright

      From the Ashes: Six Solo Plays © Copyright 2023 by Shauntay Grant

      All contributions herein are copyright © 2023 by their respective authors

      First edition: June 2023

      Printed and bound in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin, Gatineau

      Jacket art and design by Leeya Rose Jackson of Noisemakers Creative Studio

      Playwrights Canada Press

      202-269 Richmond St. W., Toronto, ON M5V 1X1

      416.703.0013 | [email protected] | www.playwrightscanada.com

      No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, or used in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for excerpts in a review or by a license from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca.

      For professional or amateur production rights, please contact Playwrights Canada Press.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: From the ashes : six solo plays / edited by Shauntay Grant.

      Other titles: From the ashes (2023)

      Names: Grant, Shauntay, editor.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230226906 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230227104

      | ISBN 9780369104465 (softcover) | ISBN 9780369104472 (PDF)

      | ISBN 9780369104489 (EPUB)

      Subjects: LCSH: Canadian drama—Women authors. | LCSH: Canadian drama—Black

      authors. | LCSH: Canadian drama—21st century. | CSH: Canadian drama (English)—

      Women authors. | CSH: Canadian drama (English)—Black authors | CSH: Canadian

      drama (English)—21st century

      Classification: LCC PS8309.W6 F76 2023 | DDC C812/.60809287—dc23

      Playwrights Canada Press operates on land which is the ancestral home of the Anishinaabe Nations (Ojibwe / Chippewa, Odawa, Potawatomi, Algonquin, Saulteaux, Nipissing, and Mississauga), the Wendat, and the members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora), as well as Metis and Inuit peoples. It always was and always will be Indigenous land.

      We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada for our publishing activities.

      Logo: Canada Council for the Arts.Logo: Government of Canada.Logo: Ontario Creates.Logo: Ontario Arts Council.

      Dedication

      To Jessica Care Moore, whose Black Statue Of Liberty called me to centre stage. And to Anne-Marie Woods, who encouraged me to stay there.

      Inhalt

      Editor’s Preface by Shauntay Grant

      Georgeena by Djanet Sears

      benu by d’bi.young anitafrika

      A Chitenge Story by Makambe K Simamba

      The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely by Ngozi Paul

      The Sender by Cheryl Foggo

      Crybaby by Kalale Dalton-Lutale

      Acknowledgements

      About the Contributors

      Editor’s Preface

      by Shauntay Grant

      About fifteen years ago I was a student in an actor training program at a Canadian theatre. One of our classes focused on movement through body motions without speech—in other words, mime. Our instructor was a veteran in pantomime. Her style of teaching came with sweeping gestures and big expressions, her face routinely morphing between comic satire and dramatic calm. On this particular day she explained that, one by one, we were to stand on a figurative stage at the centre of the room and think private thoughts while slowly spinning around full circle. It was somewhat of an exercise in embodiment, since everyone had to guess who the student-actor had become in that particular moment (without the student expressly giving it away with words or gestures). Someone on their deathbed? A student flunking out of college? A child? Strangely, our guesses were almost always right. So when it came my turn I was confident my peers would empathize with what I was feeling, what I was offering from the stage.

      I remember standing in that small, boxy studio—giant mirrors wall-to-wall. I looked straight ahead but fixed my eyes downward, trying to dodge my reflection in the glass. I stepped left to begin a slow three-sixty turn—not a sound except the scuffing of my shoes against the floor. I abandoned the idea of dreaming and instead settled into my own reality. I was not an elder or a student or a child; I was myself: a young woman peaceably fixed on meditating, tired in the way students are always tired, bolder with each step, longing for life, stories, culture, art . . .

      Oh yes, can you see it? the instructor said, interrupting the end of my turn. All the students looked wonderingly at me. Can you see it? she asked again, pointing in my direction. She’s like the Black woman on the auction block; I can hear them now: ‘She got good teeth!?’ She’s hunched forward, fingers tapping away at her incisors. ‘She got good teeth!?’ she says again, and I don’t wait for a response. I walk off and sit down, pull my knees up, and lower my head.

      I can feel my eyes moisten. Oh, did that offend you? I hear her say. I blink away a tear and look up, convinced I must be dreaming, searching her face and trying to rationalize this moment, to understand why my turn had been reduced to a haphazard slave narrative told in someone else’s tongue. Did that offend you? she asks again, this time with her eyes. Everyone is watching me, wondering if I will answer. I look away, waiting for the room to move on. When it doesn’t, I gather my knees again and fold back into myself. A classmate reaches for me, and I fight the urge to cry.

      The impulse to edit a collection of solo plays by Black wom♥n began with this—an experience that halted any hopes I might have had for acting professionally. I finished the acting program, but I only went to one audition afterwards, my thoughts frequently drifting back to my movement instructor tapping her teeth and inspecting me with squinty eyes. In a city where Black theatre was—and still is—the exception and not the norm, I wondered what white directors saw when they looked at me. If they balked at my suggestion they consider me—a Black woman—for roles traditionally earmarked for white actors.

      Some part of me had become unsettled at centre stage. And so my decision to prioritize playwriting over acting came in part from a desire to reframe the narrative that clouded my student experience; to tell my story, and stories from my community, on my own terms. But I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge the many poets and playwrights whose work and words have influenced my writing for the stage. From Beah Richards (A Black Woman Speaks . . . of White Womanhood, of White Supremacy, of Peace, 1951) to Ntozake Shange (for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, 1976), Djanet Sears (Afrika Solo, 1987), and Jessica Care Moore (Black Statue of Liberty, 1995), I have been inspired—by these and so many other literary luminaries—to write, discover, and champion Black wom♥n in theatre and performance. While From the Ashes does not represent the entire canon of solo plays written by Black wom♥n in Canada, it does offer a glimpse of what I feel are some of the most exciting offerings to emerge in this area over the past decade. With works that are autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical) and written for one performer, the plays in this anthology explore themes of Blackness, wom♥nhood, motherhood, mythology, racism, sexuality, and trauma, and champion Black wom♥n’s bodies, stories, and experiences at centre stage.

      Makambe K Simamba’s A Chitenge Story follows a young woman who travels to her native Zambia to find and confront the man who abused her as a child. Based on her own experiences, Simamba bravely turns a tale of personal trauma into one of healing. Using the chitenge—a colourful African fabric—as a metaphor for memory, she roots her audiences in the sights, songs, language, and customs of Zambian culture in this gripping story that hits all the right notes and achieves a satisfying balance between seriousness and humour. In The Sender by Cheryl Foggo, a woman working for a global racism-elimination project encounters some technical difficulties when someone unexpectedly objects to the project’s restrictions. Foggo skilfully uses an Afrofuturist methodology to unpack issues of race and racism, inviting us to consider parameters—both real and imagined—imposed on marginalized groups now and in the future. Ngozi Paul’s The Emancipation of Ms. Lovely chronicles a woman’s life as seen through different stages of her sexual awakening. Lovely’s experiences are set against the story of Sara Baartman—an African woman who was exhibited as a freak-show attraction under the name Hottentot Venus in nineteenth-century Europe. Historic and contemporary representations of—and attitudes toward—Black women and Black female bodies converge in this multi-layered work that carries both tragic and comedic notes. And in Georgeena by Djanet Sears, a bride speeds down the highway, struggling to make sense of what led her to that moment, all while calming her emotions as she processes feelings of loss, anger, deception, and distress. Inspired by true events, Sears has created a character in Georgeena that is compelling, relatable, and wonderfully bold.

      Other works in this anthology appear to blur the lines between playwriting and poetry. In Kalale Dalton-Lutale’s Crybaby, a young woman falls in love for the first time, which opens a well of questions about her identity. Crybaby’s adolescent years are unpacked through a set of linked vignettes—musings, aphorisms, poems—that effortlessly transport us back to childhood, amplifying a unique coming-of-age experience that rings familiar with its references to Barbie, Anne of Green Gables, compact discs, and classic breakfast food. And in benu by d’bi.young anitafrika, a young woman faces motherhood while still coming to terms with her own motherlessness. This second work in the sankofa trilogy is a thrilling biomyth that follows sekesu sankofa as shx enters into motherhood while confronting difficult childhood memories; her daughter benu is named for the mythical Egyptian bird—a predecessor of the Greek phoenix. Formally inventive, the play’s scenes move through structural shifts—from conversations among characters that read like narrative prose poems, to poetic monologues and entire scenes conveyed by way of a line or two from a song. Like other works in this anthology, benu draws on the playwright’s personal experiences, both lived and deeply felt, as witness to the worlds, histories, and stories that have surrounded them.

      In her nOTES oF a cOLOURED gIRL: 32 sHORT rEASONS wHY i wRITE fOR tHE tHEATRE (in Harlem Duet, 1998), Sears equates writing with the experience of giving birth: In a very deep way, I feel that I am in the process of giving birth to myself. In a similar way, the works in this collection can be interpreted as each playwright’s creative offspring; through personal narrative and reflection as witnesses, they write themselves into existence. And like the ancient bird set ablaze rising from its own ashes, these plays collect the remnants of charred, challenging human experiences to shape them into well-formed works of art that cultivate connection, healing, hope, and love.

      Content Warning

      This book contains coarse language, racial slurs, and sexually explicit material including descriptions of sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.

      Georgeena

      A Ten-Minute Monodrama

      by Djanet Sears

      Playwright’s Note

      In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, when race-based incidents are investigated in the media, it is

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