The Struggle Continues: Robbie McCauley - (Paperback)

About the Book

"As a playwright, director, and performer, Robbie McCauley has been an influential presence in the American avant-garde theatre for many decades. In her work, she consistently confronts uncomfortable truths about race and racism in America with a sharp eye for nuance and complexity, using the personal to extend into the universal by weaving her own family history into her narratives. By breaking down the traditional walls between performer and spectator, her plays encourage challenging and necessary dialogue about the ways race affects our social frameworks and individual lived experiences. In addition to containing the full text of McCauley's plays Sally's Rape, Indian Blood, Sugar, and Jazz 'n Class, this volume includes insightful introductions to each play as well as additional essays by McCauley and other leading writers and academics about her work and legacy"--

Book Synopsis

A consummate compendium that highlights the work of an audacious, incomparable theatremaker.

A vital presence in the avant-garde theatre movement since the 1970s, Robbie McCauley worked as a playwright, director, and performer for many decades, garnering international acclaim for her thought-provoking work. Her plays consistently confronted uncomfortable truths about race and racism in America by breaking down the walls between performer and spectator. McCauley's uncompromising and uplifting work sought to highlight the varied lived experiences of Black women, as well as their indelible mark on global culture.

In this volume, you'll find:

• The full text of McCauley's plays Sally's Rape, Indian Blood, Sugar, and Jazz 'n Class


• Insightful introductions to each play


• Additional essays by McCauley and other leading writers and academics about her work and legacy

Review Quotes

"Robbie McCauley is a formidable actor, writer, and director. As a performer, she takes dramatic risks, exhibiting an almost palpable vulnerability, a terrific intelligence, a breathtaking range of emotions."

--BOMB magazine

"[McCauley is] a skilled performer and raconteur who knows the subtle difference between speaking with--rather than to or at--her audience."

--Boston Globe

"Over and over again, [Sally's Rape] reveals sharp, new facets of American truths, truths we secretly hold to be self-evident, but never discuss, truths about racism and misogyny, oppression and history...[it] makes us start talking."

--Village Voice

About the Author

Robbie McCauley was a playwright, director, and performer who was an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad. Her play Sally's Rape won the 1991 Obie Award for Best New American Play and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance. Other notable works include Sugar, Indian Blood, Mississippi Freedom, Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White, The Other Weapon, and Quabbin Dance.

McCauley was a recipient of the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance, and was selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow. Her work has been widely anthologized, including the volumes Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics.

Striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local white and Black people, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston, and Los Angeles, produced by The Arts Company. In 1998, her "Buffalo Project" was highlighted as one of "The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" by The Village Voice, a roster including work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage.

Robbie McCauley taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, Boston College, Emerson College, and New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

Alisa Solomon is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the MA concentration in Arts & Culture. A longtime theater critic, political journalist, and dramaturg (most recently for Anna Deavere Smith's Notes from the Field), she is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and of Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, an "editor's choice" in the New York Times Book Review and winner of the Jewish Journal Book Prize, the George Freedley Memorial Award (Theatre Library Association), and the Kurt Weill Prize. She is co-editor, with Tony Kushner, of Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Elin Diamond is professor of English and comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (1997) and Pinter's Comic Play (1985); editor of Performance and Cultural Politics (Routledge, 1996); and co-editor of Performance, Feminism, and Affect in Neoliberal Times (Palgrave, 2017) and The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill (2009). Her many essays on drama, performance and feminist theory have appeared in Theatre Journal, PMLA, ELH, Discourse, TDR: The Drama Review, Modern Drama, and in anthologies published in the U.S., Europe, and India. She is currently working on a book on modernism, globalization, and performance.

Cynthia Carr is the author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012), winner of a Lambda Literary Award and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America (2006), and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (1993). Carr chronicled the work of contemporary artists as a Village Voice staff writer in the 1980s and 1990s (under the byline C. Carr). Her work has appeared in Bookforum, New York Times, TDR: The Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. From 2016-17, she was a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY Graduate Center.