Plays by Aishah Rahman

Aishah Rahman

Editorial: Broadway Play Publishing Inc • 1997

• En inglés. Plastificado. Fecha y firma en página de respeto. Por lo demás en muy buen estado. 1a Ed. Contiene introducción y tres obras de Aishah Rahman: Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage / The Mojo and the Sayso / Only in America. UNFINISHED WOMEN deals with the events in a home for unwed mothers on the last day of jazz musician Charlie Parker’s life, March 12, 1955. The play digs beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teenage mothers. Inspired by the 1973 killing of a ten-year-old boy by New York City police, THE MOJO AND THE SAYSO is both a comic and dramatic study of the ways that people cope with the aftermath of terrible tragedy. ONLY IN AMERICA is oracular, mythic, wicked satire, with outrageous humor and provocative subject matter. In this play, Aishah Rahman achieves a synthesis of Jazz and secular speech, as she creates a language for America’s “invisible women.” ONLY IN AMERICA is set in an imaginary Animal Bureau of Civil Rights in Washington DC, and was written, in part, in reaction to Anita Hill’s testimony about working with Clarence Thomas. Aishah Rahman was born in Harlem on November 4, 1936 and died December 29, 2014 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. An accomplished playwright and author, Aishah was a Professor of Literary Arts and taught at Brown from 1992 – 2011. A graduate of Howard University and Goddard College, Rahman, along with Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and others was active in the 1960’s Black Arts Movement. She described her writing as adhering to a “jazz aesthetic” and was the author of numerous plays, including the dramas UNFINISHED WOMEN CRY IN NO MAN’S LAND WHILE A BIRD DIES IN GILDED CAGE, THE MOJO AND THE SAYSO, ONLY IN AMERICA, CHIAROSCURO and three plays with music, LADY DAY A MUSICAL TRAGEDY, THE TALE OF MADAME ZORA and HAS ANYBODY SEEN MARIE LAVEAU? Her plays were produced at the Public Theatre, Ensemble Theatre, BAM and theaters and universities across the United States. She served as director of playwriting at the New Federal Theater in New York. Among her numerous fellowships, grants and awards are a special citation from the Rockefeller Foundation of the Arts for dedication to playwriting in the American Theater. Her plays are distributed by Broadway Play Publishing. Chewed Water: A Memoir, the story of growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and ’50s, was published in 2001 by University of New England Press.