 of their works around the country. And to animate Black plays and what it means, we have invited DC's own Jennifer Nelson to do a reading of New Black Math by Susan Laurie Parks. And we'd like to invite her to the stage now. 10 years after writing the essay, The Equation for Black People on Stage, I'm standing at the same crossroads asking the same questions. No sweat. Sometimes you can walk 100 miles and end up in the same spot. The world ain't round for nothing, right? What is a Black play? The definition is housed in the reality of two things that occurred recently and almost simultaneously. 26 August, 2005, playwright, scholar, poet, King August Wilson announces he's dying of cancer and Hurricane Katrina devastates the Gulf Coast. It feels like Judgment Day. What I'm talking about today is the same and different. I was tidy back then and now I'm tidier. Tidier today like a tidal wave. What is a Black play? A Black play is angry. A Black play is fierce. A Black play is double voiced but rarely confused. A Black play got style. A Black play is of the people, by the people and for the people. A Black play is smooth but not slick. Heavy but not thick. Can't be tamed. Often does not comb its hair. Wipes its mouth with the back of its black hand or with a linen napkin, whichever is more readily available. A Black play is late. A Black play is right on and right on time. A Black play is deep. A Black play is armed to the teeth. A Black play bows to God and then rose the boat ashore. A Black play makes do if it got to. Fight, scream, sings, dreams, works it. Talks in code and tells it like it is all up in your face. A Black play gives you five. A Black play is robust and alive. A Black play is in the house and looking good too. A Black play is a bad motherfucker. A Black play does not exist. Every play is a Black play. Say what? A Black play is a white play when the lights go out. A Black play is a white play when you read between the lines. A Black play got its picture on the wall of your local post office. A Black play got its black butt in the White House seated at the right hand of the man. A Black play keeps you up at night. A Black play is awake. A Black play going to kick your ass. A Black play has genitals that people think about long after the curtain comes down. A Black play is running for president. A Black play got to get out to vote. A Black play is a leader but seldom an elected official. A Black play as a child wondered why if Jesse Owens won all them gold medals then how come a Black man couldn't be the white man in a presidential race? A Black play is in the streets. A Black play ain't no Negro. A Black play is a nigger. A Black play is buck wild. A Black play is mixed. A Black play is on Broadway the great white way. A Black play is not on Broadway and furthermore ain't studying no Broadway. A Black play is coming soon to a theater near you. A Black play got a fro. A Black play know the know. A Black play go toe to toe and all the way out the dough. A Black play going to burn that MF down Monday through Friday and twice on weekends. A Black play is chronic. A Black play takes into account that pollsters have found out that Black folks don't attend the theaters in numbers large enough to influence the selection of plays produced. A Black play is very intellectual. A Black play has studied, conducts discourse, and on certain days of the week can be found living in the big house of tradition. A Black play got a mission. A Black play dreams the impossible dream. A Black play is such things as dreams are made on. A Black play was the first Black play ever to be written and will be the last Black play standing. A Black play takes shape just outside the reaches of your white understanding no matter what you'll call a baby. A Black play ain't for you. A Black play ain't about you. A Black play ain't integrated and don't wanna be. A Black play ain't playing. A Black play knows that when audiences read it primarily through the rubric of race relations that those audiences are suffering from an acute attack of white narcissism. If you have a need to see yourself reflected in things that are not directly about you, then you are one of the afflicted. A Black play don't give a shit what you think. A Black play knows all about the Black hole and the great hole of history and ain't afraid of going there. A Black play sometimes puts its foot in its mouth, but hell. A Black play sometimes got mouths to feed and shula that takes like chicken when you're hungry. A Black play wants to know where here your tubman stay at. A Black play fights the power. A Black play wants to uplift the race. A Black play might just set the race back 10 years. A Black play is not political. That term don't even begin to approach its complexity, especially these days, dog. A Black play knows how to play the game. A Black play is. A Black play in the United States of America was ripped from the bosom of the motherland, caught by the man or sold down river by its brothers, crossed the Atlantic in chains, had its God smashed to bits and pieces, was handed Jesus as a pacifier, and later when Jesus wasn't working so good, welfare came into play, had its language ripped out of its mouth, its family torn asunder, all this and more, and a Black play is still expected to play by the rules, is still expected to be interested in what the other deems interesting and valid and valued. How much of that shit can I buy with food stamps? Or said another way, I pay first class taxes, how come I can't get second class service? A Black play ain't playing your game. It might look like it's playing your game, but if it looks like that to you, then that just means human played, honey. A Black play knows what time it is. A Black play ain't gonna give you the time of day. A Black play kicks a man when he's down, eats its own, has faith in the system, which is less a function of trust and confusion and fatigue, waits for the man to shape up his ship, in short, makes all the mistakes of a great people falling on hard times and working on getting their game back. A Black play is the feel good show of the century. A Black play is the blues. A Black play don't forget that in the 1980s, MTV didn't want colored faces on the airwaves. A Black play don't forget the numerous hard times back in the olden days when the numerous hard times is going on right now. A Black play keeps on keeping on. A Black play asks, where Martin and Malcolm stay at? A Black play gets down. A Black play is old. A Black play is just getting started. A Black play asks, where's Mr. James Baldwin stay at? A Black play asks, where's Satchel Page and Sunhouse and Memphis Mini and George Washington Carver and all of them stay at? A Black play is often characterized by healthy doses of word play such as snaps and yo mama jokes. A Black play takes you to the bridge. The bridge, a Black play by Suzanne Laurie Parks. Characters, mama, an older woman, and yo, her husband. Setting, they sit atop their house which is under 20 feet of water. Helicopters from the National Guard in the near distance are about to perform a heroic rescue of our characters. But first, yo, we just made the last payment on the house too. Mama, yo, sometimes it bees that way. Yo, everything we own is washed away. Mama, bank owned the house and then us. Yo, now the flood owns everything looks like. Mama, you know it yo. Yo, mama, yo. How can you tell a nigger that's crazy from a nigger that ain't crazy? Mama, I don't know. How can you tell a nigger that's crazy from a nigger that ain't crazy? Yo, the crazy nigger is the nigger that ain't crazy. Curtain, a Black play is Black. A Black play is asked to explain itself. A Black play is tempted to expose itself. A Black play got a message. A Black play knows the real deal. A Black play is told that it is about race and a Black play knows that it's really about other shit. A Black play knows it's knows that race relations sell. A Black play knows that race relations are a holding cell. A Black play is blacker than my new black cat, Hound dog, named after Hound dog Taylor, the blues guitarist, who is also a polydactyl brother. A Black play is blacker than black. A Black play is written by a black person. A Black play has black actors. A Black play is written by a white person and has white actors. A Black play doesn't have anything to do with black people. I'm saying the glass menagerie is a Black play. Say what? Cause. The presence of the white suggests the presence of the black. Every play that is born in the United States of America is a Black play because we all exist in the shadow of slavery. All of us. The Iceman Cometh is a Black play. Angels in America is a Black play. And Krishna knows he's a brother. It's all black. What, oh, the intermission. What in God's name are we going to do to help our brothers and sisters get to the Promised Land in this lifetime? I know it's not fashionable to ask these questions. I know it's not fashionable to suggest that we have some housekeeping to do. I know it's uncool to suggest that we got to do something other than lay our problems on the doorstep of the man. I know it's unhipped to confront our own trip, but what should we do? Wait for the man to clean his house? Oh, please. Sister on the street. How did this essay about Black theater turn into a diatribe? Brother on the corner, shouting from the sidelines. What you know about diatribe? You don't know what a diatribe is? You're just talking diatribe so she'll put you in her essay. Sister on the street. And me being in her essay is going to be the end of your world. Sides, she got a point. We got to take more responsibility. We got to quit waiting on the man. Tomorrow is always a new day dawning, but don't it often smell of the same old shit? Brother on the corner. SOS, I'm with you on that. Sister on the street. If you're waiting on the man, you're going to be waiting all your life, brother on the corner. Plus in your next life too, don't forget about karma and shit. Sister on the street. People want to be free, but they spend their entire existence waiting on the man, brother on the corner. Instead of breaking free and leading a whole lot of people to free them with them. Sister on the street. Damn right. Black playwright. Either of you two got some change. My cell phone don't work around here and I need to use the pay phone. I'm putting in a call to Harriet Tubman. I'm putting in a call to Nat Turner. I'm calling up John Brown and Frederick Douglass and Ms. Sojourner Truth. They are still here because when they died, they multiplied. Operator? We got to crack the heart wide open because when it healed up last time, it healed up wrong. A crack it open and reset it, heal it right. Crack the mind wide open because when it healed up our thoughts healed wrong. Brother on the corner. Do she know that pay phone don't work? Sister on the street. Yeah, she knows. Black playwright. Audiences still ask, what do black people think about such and such? Black people think the world is fucked. That's what black people think. Black people don't always use apostrophes either. Black people took the rallying cry, burn baby, burn and turned it into the chorus of disco inferno and some of us danced all the way to the bank. That's what black people think. Black people know there is a war going on against our blackness and somehow we've been enlisted to fight on the front lines. Brother on the corner. What's she talking about now? Sister on the street. A black play. Brother on the corner. Go ahead girl. End of intermission. A black play fights the power. A black play sometimes does not make it to the page or stage and consists of just some high powered thoughts going on inside the bright blackness of your head. A black play is Dr. Heal Good because theater is a healing thing. A black play gives us a role to play and when someone steps into that role the rest of us get someone to look at, someone like us to look at. Seeing yourself mirrored is a basic component of healthy psychological development. I'm not talking about creating a series of model behaviors but roles like the roles in the passion play. You know what a passion play is like when they reenact the journey of Christ on Easter and the town gathers to watch and act to go through all his moments as he carries his cross up the hill, et cetera. So the black playwright gives us a role because it is in having a role that we have an opportunity to imaginatively participate and it is through participation that we work out the demons. A black play is a poem, like life is a poem, like the Bible is a poem, like the Bhagavata is a poem, a song of God, no effort is ever wasted, it says. You have rights to your actions but not rights to the fruits of your actions. It says, the charioteer opens his mouth and shows us that he is the infinite. A black play embraces the infinite. A black play is August Wilson, to October, 2005. He died today. A black play asks, where Mr. August Wilson stay at? A black play is not ignorant of history but neither is the play history's slave. A black play is tragic, a black play is funny as hell, a black play has contempt for the other and love too. A black play is currently studying how such a love and such a contempt can coexist in the same heart, in the same breath. A black play plays well in countries where there are no black people and yet helps those countries to identify themselves as black. A black play employs the black not just as a subject but as a platform, eye and telescope through which it intercourses with the cosmos. A black play has at least one panther in it. A black play recognizes the importance of the evidence of things unseen. A black play is too much. A black play can take you there. A black play is simple. A black play is complicated. A black play is all that. A black play is a piece of work. A black play is worth the price of admission. A black play is free, peace and power to the people.