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A Literary Family Tree of Black Women Playwrights
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Lorraine Hansberry (1930–65) A Raisin in the Sun: A Drama in Three Acts (1959): Discriminatory housing practices and poverty— affecting behavior, health outcomes, and learning— threaten the Youngers with destruction.
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—ERIC M. GLOVER
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Hansberry’s literary family tree includes notable Black women playwrights who took the stage before and after her. If you are looking for historical and contemporary plays by and about Black women, you may start with Hansberry in 1959 and find daring women before her, after her, and into the future.
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Plays by and about Black women reflect a variety of styles and substances, by turns dramatic and funny, and ranging from folk drama influences and realism in the past to more experimental techniques in the present. Playwrights take up matters of Black community, Black Nationalism, private and public spheres, self-definition, and selfdetermination, as well as issues of economics, gender, politics, religion, romance, and violence in everything from full-length dramatic works to oneacts to pageants.
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The crown of Lorraine Hansberry’s literary family tree of Black women playwrights reaches high, and the roots run deep across space and time. A legacy of Black women playwrights anchors her to the soil and feeds not only her creative work but also the generations of future playwrights she inspires to tell stories of their own. The origins of Black women writing for the theater look backward at slavery and freedom and reach forward into the #blacklivesmatter age and on to a truly more perfect union. However, racism and sexism made it hard—and continue to make it hard—for Black women playwrights to climb to the top and make it onto the professional stages that mark success—those of regional theater, Off-Broadway, and Broadway.
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