Ed Bullins: Twelve Plays and Selected Writings | 
| Author: Ed Bullins
Creator: Mike Sell
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $25.95
New (14) Used (5) from $12.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1407950
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 328
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 0472031821
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.54
EAN: 9780472031825
ASIN: 0472031821
Publication Date: November 27, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Ed Bullins: Twelve Plays and Selected Writings brings together significant and provocative plays, fiction, essays, and letters of one of the most important playwrights in the U.S., African-American, and world dramatic traditions. Bullins was a crucial figure of the Black Arts Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s that included writers Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Lorenzo Thomas, Sonia Sanchez, and others. He was playwright-in-residence at the historic New Lafayette Theatre in New York and co-editor of Black Theatre magazine. Bullins is recipient of three Obie awards, a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Living Legend award from the National Black Theatre Festival in 1997. This collection displays his audacious experimentation with dramatic genre, his foundational and historic statements about African-American dramatic writing, and his role as political activist inside the theater world and out.
Focusing on the most significant period of his long and still lively career, the anthology includes his signature plays Clara’s Ole Man, In the Wine Time, and The Fabulous Miss Marie; the new, unpublished Harlem Diva; and fiction, essays, and letters, including his groundbreaking essays on black theater and a long excerpt from his controversial novel, The Reluctant Rapist. The volume is introduced and annotated by theater critic Mike Sell, providing invaluable critical and historical context to contemporary readers. Those familiar with Bullins’s work and those encountering it for the first time will find this an appealing collection.Bullins
Mike Sell is Associate Professor of English, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/ Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement.
“Ed Bullins, along with Amiri Baraka, is probably the most celebrated playwright to come out of the Black Arts Movement. Bullins radically revised avant-garde drama, while reaching out to a broad audience. His plays are suffused with trenchant, dire realism depicting the everyday struggles of African Americans with psychological depth that poeticizes their everyday speech.”
--Marlon Ross, University of Virginia
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| Customer Reviews:
Quantitatum Scale November 1, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Ed Bullins is one of America's best playwrights. His work from the 1960s to the present has evolved. His work is as breathtaking as it is challenging. This University of Michigan volume is the most recent addition to his work and includes his newest play, "Harlem Diva" (2005) for the first time. It contains seven more plays, "How Do You Do," "Clara's Ole Man," "The Electronic N*gger," "In the Wine Time," "The Fabulous Miss Marie," "Malcolm: '71 Or Publishing Blackness," [short] and "JoAnne."
It was long a goal of mine to be able to direct a Bullins play. With the author's permission, we tweaked the title and presented "The Electronic Fool" in a program of one acts this summer. [Reference Magnolia Arts Center] Working with the playwright's words in production is a breathtaking experience. This is said to be Bullins' most humorous play, but the humor is cutting edge -- South Park. It must have been amazingly revolutionary in 1968 when it flew from his pen. The language he gives to Carpentier goes from the inane to the insane. In an effort to create the quintessential know-it-all, the Electronic N says, "With our present cybernetic generation it is psycho-politically relevant to engage our socio-philosophical existence on a quantitatum scale, which is, of course pertinent to the outer motivated migration of our inner-oriented social compact." How many times does an actor get to say something that completely bananas that sounds like it means something? Bullins was in high gear on this play and our production shined because of the great play.
Other pieces are meant to be read like 1970's "A Short Play for a Small Theatre" where Black Man polishes a hand gun in front of a white audience and to conclude the play assassinates each member of the audience. The violence of the racial struggle is also in evidence in Bullins' brilliant "JoAnne" that follows the real life North Carolina trial of Joan Little in the early 70s. Bullins pushes the piece to the limit with the mistreatment by the jailer silhouetted behind a scrim. It is a breathtaking drama that will find few stages able to handle the depth and power, probably decades ahead of its time.
The writings at the end of book are some of Bullins' published essays and letters on the state of Black Theatre and the need to find other models besides traditional European theatre. One of my favorite Bullins' plays, "In New England Winter," is not included here; so this is not a collected anthology. However, it is an excellent overview to the frequently difficult but exceptionally rewarding work of this master playwright! Bravo!
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