Eisa Davis – författare

Drama / 3m, 3f / Finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama In 1955, in the redwood country north of San Francisco, a multiracial girl grows up in a predominantly white town whose residents pepper their speech with the historical dialect of Boontling. Found floating in a basket on the river as an infant, Bulrusher is an orphan with a gift for clairvoyance that makes her feel like a stranger even amongst the strange: the taciturn schoolteacher who adopted her, the madam who runs her brothel with a fierce discipline, the logger with a zest for horses and women, and the guitar-slinging boy who is after Bulrusher's heart. Just when she thought her world might close in on her, she discovers an entirely new sense of self when a black girl from Alabama comes to town. Passionate, lyrical, and chock full of down-home humor, this play is an unforgettable experience by a new, thrilling voice. "[Davis] tickles the ears of her listeners...moving scenes on the banks of the pebble-strewn river...feel utterly true." - The New York Times "Davis explores her themes in unexpected and evocative ways ...The still waters of Bulrusher turn out to run pretty deep." - The San Francisco Chronicle "...an engrossing rush...Eisa Davis' gleaming marriage of poetry and myth...has a big heart and a wide-open soul." - Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune "Mixing together issues of family, heritage, race and love, Eisa Davis' Bulrusher delivers a powerful impact with a poetic, deeply realized script and story. In the hands of director Marion McClinton...the work becomes transcendent." - TalkingBroadway.org "Bulrusher brims with profound lyrical passion...a poetic play with much nuance..." - NYTheatre.com "Davis has powers as a writer to find beauty in almost everything, and her play pulses with compassion and life. Bulrusher has the kind of satisfying, uplifting ending you can only find in live theater - vibrant, poetic, immediate and thrilling." - Bay Area News Group

'Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre.Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.

In September 2021, playwright/performers Eisa Davis and Jillian Walker met to discuss Walker’s performance ritual, SKiNFoLK: An American Show (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in March 2022). In January 2022, they met again to discuss Davis’s installation performance piece The Essentialisn't (forthcoming from 53rd State Press in 2023). In these twin interviews about the uncanny ways their works mirror each other, Davis and Walker take up questions of archive, memory, generational trauma, survivor's guilt, and the conundrum of performance given the commodification and consumption of Black women's joy and pain. How to acknowledge, process, and heal the hurt that is felt? How to perform without being captured by others' ideas of what it means to be oneself?

Can you be Black and not perform?This is the question of The Essentialisn’t, a conceptual art installation with award-winning writer and performer Eisa Davis singing for her life in a tank of water, or at the piano in a pasture of hair. A transatlantic undrowning which moves from enslavement through the Harlem Renaissance into the diasporic present, the piece interrogates the racial imaginary with an embrace of interiority and innovation, making space for an uncommodified Black feminine practice of sovereignty and liberation.

Trainedin 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, erroris a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.