Description

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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
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, error
is a necessary instrument--maybe the sounding weight.

About the Author

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Eisa Davis is 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 play Bulrusher, and wrote and starred in Angela's Mixtape, named a best of the year by The New Yorker. Other plays include Ramp (Ruby Prize winner), The History of Light (Barrymore nomination), Paper Armor, Umkovu, Six Minutes, Warriors Don't Cry, Mushroom, and : Girls:: Chance:: Music: . Collaborations include Maze at The Shed, The House on Coco Road, Active Ingredients, Hip Hop Anansi, and Cirque du Soleil's first ice show, Crystal. Works in progress include a sound art installation/performance piece entitled The Essentialisn't, and a musical version of Devil In A Blue Dress. Eisa wrote for both seasons of the Netflix series She's 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. Eisa's recent work includes a microplay by Lynn Nottage in the virtual series Theatre For One, the role of June in the musical adaptation of The Secret Life of Bees (AUDELCO award, Lortel nomination), Kings at the Public (Drama League nomination), the 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, and Preludes created by Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin, for which she received her second Lucille Lortel nomination. Other theatre performances include Antigone in Ferguson, Luck of the Irish (Lucille Lortel and AUDELCO nominations), the world premieres of This and The Call, the first revival of The Piano Lesson at Yale Rep (also composer and music director), and the acclaimed Broadway rock musical Passing Strange, captured on film by Spike Lee. Current television work includes Betty, Bluff City Law, God Friended Me, Rise, Condi Rice on The Looming Tower, and Succession.