Race
Plays About Race
These plays about race are dramatic and entertaining with many comedy scenes. They deal with themes of persecution, black history, prejudice, African American History, slavery, indigenous and remote communities, racism, religious intolerance and the people caught up in them. Portraying endangered lives, lives marred by racist attitudes, racial tension, division and friction. Money and politics lie at the root of all the plays to a greater or lesser degree.
Showing all 11 results
- $11.00 – $125.00
N
- 100 minutes
- 2 Males, 1 Female
Colleges, Community, Diverse Cast, Drama
Adrienne Earle Pender gives us the influential and momentous “N” play, that dramatizes the struggle between playwright Eugene O’Neill and actor Charles Sidney Gilpin over the inclusion of the “N” word in the script for O’Neill’s first box office hit, The Emperor Jones. in 1920. The play was turned into a film “The Black Emperor of Broadway” , screened in 2020 to great acclaim.
Read More - $9.97 – $75.00
Accident
- 30 minutes
- 2F
Community, Competitions, Diverse Cast, Prejudice, Simple Set, Small Cast, Tolerance, Touring, Trust
Two women, one white and one black, meet as a result of an accident involving one of their sons. In this pre-trial. they each make unexpected discoveries that reveal the role that race and gender play in our society.
Read More - $9.97 – $85.00
PTSD & Me
- 60 - 90 minutes
- 1 F
Monologue, Poetic Drama, Bare Stage, Community
A one-woman play script consisting of a collection of poetic monologues, that is irresistibly lined with head-bopping rhythms and palpable poetry, is Spoken Word Poetry at its best. Lays bare the horror and humor of war.
Read More - $11.00 – $125.00
The Crying Tree
- 110 Minutes
- 4 Males/3Females/Max/Min 7
Dramedy, African American Theme, Colleges, Community, Diverse Cast, Drama
A stunning drama with wonderful comic scenes, which received a special mention in the 2019 ScreenCraft Stage Play Competition. The story: in 2018, a black Congressman is caught up in a Trump impeachment battle and the alt right. Two hundred years earlier at the same plantation home, a slave is deciding whether to escape. Two parallel stories show how much has and hasn’t changed about race and politics in America.
Read More - $7.99 – $110.00
Angel Band
- 110 Minutes
- 14 Males, 5 Females, Max. 19+/Min 15
Drama, Edgy Play, Large Cast, Lust, Prejudice, Tolerance
Leaders of the snake-handling Signs Following Church in the hills of Appalachia are threatened by the snakes they handle to prove their Godliness and by the law enforcement and child welfare agencies of the surrounding community. They live side-by-side with the Blue People, a society of outcasts whose skin is marked by a blue skin tone. Into the mix comes Jay, a shy, possibly autistic, journalist intent on uncovering the secret world of these hidden cultures.
Read More - $9.00 – $60.00
Refraction of Light
- 100 minutes
- 2 Males, 2 Females, Min/Max 4
Drama, Professional, Simple Set
On the day World War II ends, another war begins. Joe Taylor, an African-American veteran decides he wants to marry Nettie French, a childhood sweetheart, and buy the house belonging to Rose Beauchamp. Rose is a white teacher who has befriended both Nettie and Joe and encouraged their friendship and academic aspirations. Rose’s prejudice rears its head and her reluctance to sell her house to Joe sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to destroy all their futures. Harry Rosen, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi Germany, enters their lives and helps them find their way home.
Read More - $9.95 – $80.00
Humans Remain
- 110 Minutes
- 2 Males, 5 Females; 1 African dancer (optional) (small roles are doubled).
Doubling Possible, Drama, Staging Design Potential
A well-meaning “foreigner” attempts to rescue the White Cliff Kinfolk – a mixed-race society isolated from civilization in the hills of New Jersey for over 200 years. Love. Death. History. Magic. Nature. Belief. All of these are played out on the stage. All but one character are mixed race, mainly African-American. One character is specified as African-American. The others are as diverse as desired. Highly theatrical staging possible.
Read More - $11.00 – $75.00
She’ll Find Her Way Home
- 100 minutes
- 2 Males, 3 Females, Min/Max 5
Community, High School, Reader's Theater
A full-length, African-American, post-Civil War drama. The only child of a deceased well-heeled Mississippi slaveholder. Martha Robb views her coming of age full of the adolescent longings and unending horizons promised by the victorious Union Army. and her quadroon complexion. She and her companion, Thomas, could forge different lives, lives absent of the old barriers … if they could only get past her mother.
Read More - $9.00 – $70.00
Nat’s Last Struggle
- 60 Minutes
- 1 Male, Min/Max 1
Simple Set
A one-man play by P. A. Wray. Nat Turner confronts his conscience in the afterlife. Nathanial “Nat” Turner (1800-1831) was an American slave who brought about the only direct, continuous slave rebellion (August 1831) in U. S. history. Some regard him as a monster, others as a hero in search of freedom. Which was he?
Great for high school, college, community theater, and readers theater.
Read More - $9.00 – $60.00
Nat Turner’s Last Struggle: Finding His Way Home
- 50 - 60 minutes
- 1 Male 1 Female Max/Min 2
Simple Set, Staging Design Potential
This one-act, two character play opens during the pre-dawn hours of November 5, 1831. It is the day that Nat Turner, leader of a bloody slave rebellion, will be tried, convicted and sentenced to death. In the predawn hours before the trial a mysterious woman enters to purify the courtroom. Seven days later she is there by the hanging tree when Turner is executed and thrown into the darkness of death – where he fears he has been eternally abandoned.
Read More - $9.97 – $70.00
Distant Survivors
- 60 Minutes
- 4 Males, 1 Female, Max/Min cast 5
Poetic Drama, Simple Set
In this poetic drama, we see the past through the eyes of a German-American who looks back on his ancestral heritage and tries to come to terms with it. He encounters voices and embodiments of World War II, like echoes from the past and tries to find answers where there are only shadows. Distant Survivors was conceived and adapted for the stage by director June Prager, based on Holocaust poetry by William Heyen.
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