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    Square Blues
    Square Blues
    Square Blues
    Ebook134 pages56 minutes

    Square Blues

    By Shay Youngblood

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Square Blues follows, a reparations activist, his mother Odessa, who married a Jewish store owner in the 1940’s and her grand daughter Karma, an art activist, during one summer weekend in the early 1990’s during which each member of his family is challenged to stand up for their beliefs in ways that threaten to tear the family apart. Three generations in a southern family respond to oppression and injustice and find the courage to stand up for their beliefs as they redefine what makes a family and what holds it together. For many years Square has been collecting names on petitions demanding Black Pay Back, financial reparations and a public apology for slavery and using money inherited from his father to bail out political prisoners and finance a radical underground movement. During the course of the play Square paints a ‘wall of resistance’ mural on the interior wall of the café depicting modern heroes and activists while his niece Karma creates art on public walls using spray paint, nude models and found objects in her art actions to bring attention to the issues she feels passion for, and Odessa is lost in her memories, grieving the loss of a most profound love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShay Youngblood
    Release dateFeb 1, 2013
    ISBN9781301015962
    Square Blues
    Author

    Shay Youngblood

    Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris, Winter Prophet, a graphic novel, Black Power Barbie and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories. Her plays, Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and Talking Bones (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Flying Blind, Square Blues and Communism Killed My Dog. An Edward Albee honoree, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, several NAACP Theater Awards, and an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction, Ms. Youngblood graduated from Clark-Atlanta University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the eastern Caribbean, as an au pair, artist's model, and poet's helper in Paris, and as a creative writing instructor in a Rhode Island women's prison. She was a 2011 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission, Creative Artist Fellow. Currently she is a writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art. "My interest in architecture has been fueled by my travels. I have lived on the East Coast, in the Deep South, Japan, Hawaii, France, Spain and the Caribbean, traveled to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Denmark and once took a three month road trip across the United States. I have a particular weakness for shoes and my guilty pleasures are spa vacations and 72 hour reading orgies. I will try almost any cuisine or any activity once, more if I like it. My art practice includes writing and painting, sometimes I combine the two. Among my creative goals are collaborations with a composer on an opera, an illustrator on a graphic novel and to develop an interdisciplinary work for the theater that integrates video animation."

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      Book preview

      Square Blues - Shay Youngblood

      SQUARE BLUES

      a play

      Shay Youngblood

      copyright © Shay Youngblood 2013

      Published by Blue Cloud Press at Smashwords

      All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

      This play is a work of fiction although it contains incidental references to actual people and places, these references are used to lend the fiction a realistic setting. All other names and characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

      www.shayyoungblood.com

      For the activists and the outlaws, the arm-chair revolutionaries and the front line soldiers

      Author’s Note

      In the mid nineties, a full production of Square Blues was scheduled in a season of Black Women Playwrights, all of whom I admired, by a theater I respected, that had produced all of my previous plays. Square Blues and most of the other plays in what would have been a radical and groundbreaking season, was cancelled. The producer was afraid of losing government funding and a significant portion of the theater’s subscriber base that might find the themes in some of the plays too provocative.

      In 1995 Anna Deveare Smith selected Square Blues for the Paul Green Playwriting Award. As an honoree for the 21st Century Playwrights Award, Edward Albee, one of the judges said of Square Blues: …it has a virtue of gut, urgency and necessity which make it stand out for me. There is an unadorned honesty to it; nothing is clever in it; the writer vanishes and we are left with the work itself… I must comment on the unusually high standard of finalists’ work. Square Blues has had a number of readings, but to date, not a single theater has mounted a full production.

      I was also told that there was too much sex and bad language in my new plays. Audiences want to be entertained, one producer confided in me, I believe underestimating a good portion of the theater’s audience. It was no secret that in the early and mid nineties there was a very conservative political atmosphere in the worlds of art and theater, there still is. The last piece I wrote for the theater was an art action for an evening of short plays and monologues about sexism in theater sponsored by the Guerilla Girls and produced at Cherry Lane Theater in New York City in the fall of 2012.

      I love the communal nature of theater and when I see a play that moves me to action, or an actor who makes me say amen out loud, I feel the need to write plays again. So that ship hasn’t sailed, yet.

      Riding a train from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island in 1992 where I was studying playwriting with Paula Vogel at Brown University, I picked up an abandoned New York Times newspaper. On the front page in the lower right hand corner was a small image of a black baseball player with a price tag hanging around his body. I looked around the train car to see if anyone else felt the same rage I felt, seeing at least three racially biased articles in the newspaper that day. In response to my anger I began to write Square Blues from the point of view of a character that had a visceral response to being assaulted everyday by images and actions that constantly denied his humanity, his cultural heritage and his manhood, and so takes action. I also wanted to look at the very different strategies of three generations in a family confronting racism, oppression, injustice, and how they each stood up for their beliefs. Naked models, a wall mural created during the course of the play, interracial, intergenerational, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia

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