Below is a sample of published scripts written by 19 Black American playwrights, in honor of Juneteenth, which is a federal holiday, although established as such only since 2021. The holiday commemorates ,June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to share the news that the Civil War had ended and that enslaved African Americans were free—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
The playwrights are listed in alphabetical order according to last name, along with the title* of at least one published play or a published collection. (Some of the individual plays were suggested by The Golden Collection, curated by playwright Jeremy O. Harris and donated to schools and libraries, as well a a Black Liberation Reading List from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center. My choices lean towards those plays that are the most readable.)
James Baldwin
Blues for Mister Charlie
The Amen Corner
James Baldwin (1924-1987) was better known as a novelist, essaying and civil rights activist (or, as he preferred to call it, public witness.) But, I pointed out after reading a recent biography, theater lovers might be surprised at how interested and involved Baldwin was throughout his life in writing and directing plays. These two plays of his were produced on Broadway, the first about murder in a small Southern town, loosely based on the 1955 killing of Emmett Till; the second, about a female pastor in a Harlem storefront church whose life unravels when her estranged, jazz musician husband returns home to die.
Alice Childress
The plays are: 1. Florence; 2. Gold Through The Trees; 3. Trouble in mind; 4. Wedding band : a love/hate story in black and white; 5. Wine in the wilderness.
Childress (1916-1994) an actress and a playwright, was the first African American woman to have a play professionally produced in New York City, “Gold Through the Trees,” in 1952, and the first woman to win an Obie for Best Play, for “Trouble in Mind,” in 1956, which is about the troubled Broadway production of a fictional anti-lynching play. Childress made her Broadway playwriting debut with “Trouble in Mind” in 2021, 27 years after her death.
Jackie Sibblies Drury
Fairview
The winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the play starts out as a family comedy but takes a sharp, sly turn into a startling examination of deep-seated paradigms about race in America. In an earlier play with a far longer title,a group of actors gather to tell the little-known story of the first genocide of the twentieth century. As the full force of a horrific past crashes into the good intentions of the present, what seemed a far-away place and time is suddenly all too close to home. The play is entitled We Are Proud To Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 – 1915 (Modern Plays)
Charles Fuller
Charles Fuller (1939-2022) wrote more than 15 plays, but he is best known for this murder mystery set in segregated Army barracks during World II. He wrote it in 1981, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, and was turned into a movie starring Denzel Washington in 1984, but it would take another four decades before it was produced on Broadway, two years before Fuller’s death.
Katori Hall
The story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night alive, in room 306 in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. In my review of the 2011 production of this play, which marked Hall’s Broadway debut, I revealed that the playwright introduces a twist that changes “The Mountaintop” from a biographical drama into the realm of the supernatural, but noted her fine ear for both the vernacular and for the soaring oratory of the pulpit.
Hall has other published plays including the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Hot Wing King
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) is best known for the first Broadway drama written by Black woman, about a working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago who decides to move into a better neighborhood, to the consternation of their new white neighbors. Lesser known are plays collected as ‘Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?‘ “Les Blancs’ was her final Broadway play. It focuses on Tshembe Matoseh, living in England with a white English wife and a newborn child, who has returned for his father’s funeral in his (unnamed) African homeland, and becomes embroiled in its turmoil. ln my review of the 2016 production for the National Theatrek I wrote that it is set in an Africa struggling against British colonialism. But some of the issues the playwright explores make it feel especially timely: It argues for racial reckoning, questions the value of good intentions, and dramatizes the complex choices in a time of crisis.
Aleshea Harris
Is God Is / What to Send Up When It Goes Down
Twin sisters undertake a dangerous journey to exact revenge upon their father at the behest of their ailing mother. In my review of the 2018 production at Soho Rep,I called it an intriguing if sometimes disconcerting mix of genres and allusions and tones that marks a noteworthy Off-Broadway debut of a playwright we’ll be hearing from. She recently turned the play into a movie.
Jeremy O. Harris
The play, which 2qw nominated for 12 Tony Awards won none, is officially described: The Old South lives on at the MacGregor Plantation—in the breeze, in the cotton fields…and in the crack of the whip. A more accurate description: Three interracial couples try to have sex and talk about it. In my review of both the 2018 Off-Broadway production and its 2019 Broadway transfer, I found it promising, provocative, and well produced, but too derivative, too long, too full of ideas that were not fully or clearly developed.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays
In “Appropriate,” which won the Tony Award for best revival of a play, the Lafayettes gather at a former plantation home to sift through the belongings of their deceased patriarch.
“An Octoroon” is a modern take on an old melodramaabout what was called miscegenation (the mixing of the races) focusing on a man who is one-eighth Negro. Jacobs-Jenkins used the characters, plot and much of the dialogue from Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, which premiered in 1859, but angles it to critique race in America, both past and present. The staging of the 2014 production at Soho Rep was memorable, with a Black actor slowly applying white makeup to perform in whiteface.
“Purpose,” winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, isn’t scheduled to be published as a script until 2028.
Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays and Other Writings (Library of Congress)
Adrienne Kennedy, born in 1931, finally had her Broadway debut in 2022 for “Ohio State Murders” but she’s probably still best known for “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” a surreal play that focuses on a woman named Sarah’s internal struggle with her racial identity, In my review of a 2016 production of this one act play at Signature (in a program that also featured one acts by Edward Albee and Maria Irene Fornes) Much of what’s on stage is happening in Sarah’s head, which explains the swirl of sentences endlessly repeated, and the nightmarish imagery.
Tarell Alvin McCraney
Surely best-known for his unpublished play Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue because it was adapted into the Oscar-winning play “Moonlight,” McCraney is the author of such lyrical works as the trilogy “The Brother/Sister Plays” trilogy, one of which “The Brothers Size,” was recently produced at the Shed. In “Choir Boy,” Jeremy Pope made his Broadway debut as a Black, gay and gifted scholarship student at a prep school for boys,.
Dominique Morisseau
The three plays — Paradise Blue, Detroit ’67 and Skeleton Crew, — all take place in Detroit, where Morisseau grew up. All three have been produced in New York. “Skeleton Crew” about four Detroit auto workers full of struggles and secrets who share a workplace about to shut down, was produced on Broadway starring Phylicia Rashad in a Tony-winning performance.
Lynn Nottage
Nottage won her second Pulitzer Prize in Drama for this play. In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggle to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near future. In my review of the 2016 Off-Broadway production as well as the 2017 Broadway transfer, I wrote: Like Grapes of Wrath, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat offers a devastating look at social and economic breakdown, told not with rants or statistics, but through a riveting tale about good people in a bad situation. If they are victims of the de-industrial revolution, Nottage isn’t as concerned with answering how did this happen as in bringing us into the world of her credible, engaging characters. Nottage is the only woman playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama twice — for this, and for “Ruined.”
Robert O’Hara
Semi-biographical subversive comedy about growing up Black and gay. In my review of the 2014 production at Playwrights Horizons, I called it a funny, bawdy and poignant collection of short plays, comedy sketches, and meta fiddling around that may at first glance seem barely connected, but are worth a second glance. It’s worth noting that this play seems to have greatly influenced Slave Play, which O’Hara directed.
Suzan-Lori Parks
Topdog/Underdog
Father Comes Home From The Wars
A prolific playwright, Parks is probably best known for “Topdog/Underdog,” a Pulitzer Prize winning play, which was staged twice on Broadway, is about Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment.
“Father Comes Home From the Wars” loosely adapts Homer’s Odyssey to a Civil War setting
Ntozake Shange
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
Shange (1948-2018), a playwright and poet, is best known for this “choreopoem” which ran for 742 thrilling performances on Broadway from 1976-1978. In my review of the 2019 revival at the Public Theater, I wrote of the seven women who brought the colors of the rainbow back to a stage through dance and song and nursery rhymes, through collective storytelling and individual tales ugly or sweet about the lives of women of color, delivered in verse.
Anna Deavere Smith
The play is based on interviews of a wide range of who experienced or observed the 1991 Crown Heights racial riots. In my review of the 2019 revival at Signature, I wrote: It would be hard to overstate the city-wide trauma that occurred in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in August, 1991, nor the power of “Fires in the Mirror,” the groundbreaking documentary play about it nine months later at the Public, which introduced New York theatergoers to the astonishing theater artist Anna Deavere Smith.
August Wilson
August Wilson American Century Cycle
August Wilson (1945 – 2005) dramatized the African American experience in the twentieth century, with a play for each decade, ten plays in all, all but one of them set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. It is no exaggeration to call this accomplishment among the greatest of any American playwright. All of the individual plays have now been produced on Broadway, and most of them have been showered with affection and acclaim, especially Fences and The Piano Lesson, both of which received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
George C. Wolfe
The Colored Museum
Its eleven “exhibits” undermine black stereotypes old and new, and provoke the question of what it means to be Black.
*Almost all of these titles are available in your local library. The titles are linked to their Amazon page, which provides more information and often offers a sample to read. Your purchase through those links may generate a small commission that helps support my work.
