Angela's Mixtape / The History of Light

(Paperback)

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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 Daviss 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 giftfor us, of course, and for Daviss aunt,activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis readsDas Kapital andlearns to drive stick andhack 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 Daviss 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 instrumentmaybe the sounding weight.

Reviews

"A revealing portrait of a young artist (born in 1970, while her aunt is in prison) struggling to find herself, while growing up in the shadow of three enormously strong, brilliant, and successful black women steeped in radical sixties politics." * New Yorker on Angela's Mixtape *
"[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." * New York Times on Angela's Mixtape *

Author Bio

Eisa Davisis an award-winning actor, writer, and singer-songwriter working on stage and screen. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her playBulrusher, and wrote and starred inAngelas Mixtape, named a best of the year byThe New Yorker. Other plays includeRamp(Ruby Prize winner),The History of Light(Barrymore nomination),Paper Armor, Umkovu, Six Minutes, Warriors Dont Cry, Mushroom, and||: Girls :||: Chance :||: Music :||. Collaborations includeMazeat The Shed,The House on Coco Road,Active Ingredients,Hip Hop Anansi, and Cirque du Soleils first ice show,Crystal. Works in progress include a sound art installation/performance piece entitledThe Essentialisnt, and a musical version ofDevil In A Blue Dress.Eisa wrote for both seasons of the Netflix seriesShes Gotta Have It, and is creating a limited series based on the memoir by Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest member of the Little Rock Nine. Eisa is a 2020 Creative Capital recipient. She was awarded the prestigious Herb Alpert Award in Theatre, and was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award and the Whitfield Cook Award, among others. She has received fellowships from Sundance, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, and the Doris Duke, Van Lier and Mellon Foundations. As an actor, she is an Obie Award winner for Sustained Excellence in Performance. Eisas recent work includes a microplay by Lynn Nottage in the virtual series Theatre For One, the role of June in the musical adaptation ofThe Secret Life of Bees(AUDELCO award, Lortel nomination),Kingsat the Public (Drama League nomination), the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production ofJulius Caesar, andPreludescreated by Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, for which she received her second Lucille Lortel nomination. Other theatre performances includeAntigone in Ferguson,Luck of the Irish(Lucille Lortel and AUDELCO nominations), the world premieres ofThisandThe Call, the first revival ofThe Piano Lessonat Yale Rep (also composer and music director), and the acclaimed Broadway rock musicalPassing Strange, captured on film by Spike Lee. Current television work includesBetty, Bluff City Law,God Friended Me,Rise, Condi Rice onThe Looming Tower, andSuccession.