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 andlearns 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.