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Trained
in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip
hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa
Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of
music alongside radical change. In
Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads
Das Kapital and
learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In
The History of Light,
Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under
racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the
grand piano,
The History of Light is a study in black and
white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal
virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice
warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist
concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error
is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.
About the author
Eisa Davis is a writer, composer, and performer. A recipient of a USA Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, an AUDELCO, an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance, and the Herb Alpert Award in Theater, Eisa was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play
Bulrusher. Along with her thirteen full-length stageworks, she has written for television, recorded two albums of original music,
Something Else and
Tinctures, and directed a short film,
Remembrance. Notable performance work includes
Kindred,
Mare of Easttown,
The Wire,
Kings,
The Essentialisn’t, the musical of
The Secret Life of Bees, and
Passing Strange. An alumnus of New Dramatists, Eisa has received residencies, awards, and fellowships from Sundance Theater Lab, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Helen Merrill Foundation, the Van Lier and Mellon Foundations, and Cave Canem. Eisa lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Summary
Trained
in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip
hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa
Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of
music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light,
Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under
racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the
grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and
white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal
virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice
warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist
concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error
is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.
Additional text
"[An] appropriately turbulent and quite funny show about the forces that influence the forging of identity....the strange juxtaposition of the prosaic trials of adolescence and the
urgent radicalism of the family politics is also what gives the show its
own distinctive identity."
