African-American
African American Play Scripts
These dramatic play scripts illuminate contemporary African American life experience and African American history. With compelling roles for black actors, contemporary monologues for male and female black actors.
Showing all 6 results
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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