Modern parallels to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience can be found in black theater, where the black body challenges the normative assumptions of classical texts and modes of creation. This is a theater of civil disobedience, which this book frames to challenge the hostility that still exists between theater and black identity.

List of IllustrationsPrologue1 Introduction, Civil Disobedience as Resistance to Tradition and Performance2 Classical Origins of Character and Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, Electra, and Orestes3 The Oedipus Story and the Perfect Play, or the Gospel According to Rita DoveThe Darker Face of the Earth and Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play4 Racial Intent and Dramatic FormEugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones5 Aristotle's "Spectacle" and August Wilson's "Spectacle Character"Joe Turner's Come and Gone6 Freedom Songs and Metaphors of HealingEugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus and Topdog/Underdog7 Civil Disobedience, Truth and Reconciliation, and the Cosmopolitan CitizenCharles Smith's The Gospel According to James, Thomas Bradshaw's Mary, David Mamet's Race, and Bruce Norris' Clybourne ParkEpilogueReferencesIndex

“This book invites us to revise existing genealogies of black theater and offers us the provocative idea of classical theory of drama as a handmaiden for the theater of civil disobedience. Like the best ideas it is bold and original and, on reading, makes perfect sense." - Emily Greenwood, Professor of Classics, Yale University“Situating Aristotle's Poetics as a major intertext, Rankine demonstrates that perhaps the most radical form of classical reception is that which sets things in motion—both in the movements of actors on stage and in the conscience of those watching.” - Denise Eileen McCoskey, Associate Professor of Classics, Affiliate, Black World Studies, Miami University“…this book will be thought provoking and richly rewarding for specialists in classical and/or black literature.” - Choice“The reader is challenged to move beyond the moral constraints of Aristotlelian drama and adopt a consciousness that involves recognizing the interplay of various sociopolitical forces and how they operate simultaneously to create an environment where convention, rather than principle, is challenged.” - Chy Sprauve, Lehman College, Journal of African American Studies