Carolyn Gage
  • Home
    • Butch Visibility Project
    • Bio and Vitae
    • Endorsements
    • Production History
    • Catalog of Books and Plays
    • Online Essays >
      • Lesbian Culture and History Essays
      • Theatre Essays
      • Feminist Essays
      • Reviews
    • Interviews >
      • Audio/Video Interviews
      • Print Interviews
  • Books and CD's
    • Gage Play Anthologies
    • Feminist Thought And Spirituality
    • Lesbian Theatre
    • CD's and DVD's
    • Anthologies with Other Authors
    • Journal Anthologies
  • Plays
    • One-Woman Shows >
      • The Second Coming of Joan of Arc
      • La Seconde Venue de Jeanne d'Arc
      • La segunda llegada de Juana de Arco
      • Joana Dark - a re-volta
      • Die Wiederkehr von Jeanne d'Arc
      • Giovanna d'Arco - la rivolta
      • ВТОРОТО ПРИШЕСТВИЕ НА ЖАНА Д’АРК (Bulgarian tranlsation of The Second Coming of Joan
      • 贞德再临_中文 (Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc)
      • The Last Reading of Charlotte Cushman
      • Crossing the Rapelands
    • Musicals >
      • The Amazon All-Stars
      • Babe! An Olympian Musical
      • How to Write a Country-Western Song
      • Leading Ladies
      • Women on the Land
    • Full-Length Plays >
      • The Abolition Plays
      • The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women
      • AXED!
      • Black Star
      • Coming About
      • Esther and Vashti
      • The Goddess Tour
      • In McClintock's Corn
      • Restell
      • Sappho in Love
      • The Spindle
      • Stigmata
      • Thanatron
      • Ugly Ducklings
    • One-Acts >
      • Ain't Got No - I Got Life
      • The A-Mazing Yamashita and the Millennial Gold-Diggers
      • Artemisia and Hildegard
      • Battered on Broadway
      • Bite My Thumb
      • The Boundary Trial of John Proctor
      • Cookin' with Typhoid Mary
      • The Countess and the Lesbians
      • The Drum Lesson
      • Easter Sunday
      • Entr'acte or The Night Eva Le Gallienne Was Raped
      • The Evil That Men Do: The Story of Thalidomide
      • Female Nude Seated
      • The Gage and Mr. Comstock
      • The Greatest Actress Who Ever Lived
      • Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist
      • Head in the Game
      • Hermeneutic Circlejerk
      • Heterosexuals Anonymous
      • Jane Addams and the Devil Baby
      • A Labor Play
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Lighting Martha
      • Little Sister
      • Louisa May Incest
      • Mason-Dixon
      • The Obligatory Scene
      • The P.E. Teacher
      • The Parmachene Belle
      • The Pele Chant
      • Planchette
      • The Poorly-Written Play Festival
      • Radicals
      • Reef Point
      • The Rules of the Playground
      • St. Frances and the Fallen Angels
      • Souvenirs from Eden
      • Starpattern
      • 'Til the Fat Lady Sings
      • Valerie Solanas At Matteawan
    • Short Short Plays >
      • 52 Pickup
      • At Sea
      • Black Eye
      • El Bobo
      • Brett Hears the Mountain Gods
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter
      • The Clarity of Pizza
      • The Great Fire
      • Hrotsvitha's Vision
      • The Intimacy Coordinator
      • The Ladies' Room
      • Miss Le Gallienne Announces the New Season
      • On the Other Hand
      • Patricide
      • The Pickle Play
    • Dramatic Adaptations >
      • Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words
      • Brett Remembers
      • Deep Haven
      • El Bobo (one-act play)
      • El Bobo (short screenplay)
      • Emily & Sue >
        • Touring Production of Emily & Sue >
          • The Creative Team
          • Director's Vision
          • Adaptor's notes
          • Open Me Carefully
      • Georgia and the Butch
      • I Have Come to Show You Death
      • Speak Fully The One Awful Word
      • We Too Are Drifting (Screenplay)
    • Special Index: Plays That Deal with Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls
    • Special Index: Plays Featuring Old and Middle-Aged Actresses
    • Special Index: Women's History Plays
    • Special Index: Romantic Plays with Happy Endings
  • Touring Work
    • Performances >
      • Lace Curtain Irish
      • Crossing the Rapelands
      • The Parmachene Belle (performance)
      • Calamity Jane Sends a Message to Her Daughter (performance)
      • Gage on Stage
    • Lectures >
      • Lizzie Borden and Lesbian Theatre
      • The Secret Life of Lesbians
      • Paradigms and Paradigm-Shifting
      • When Sex Is Not the Metaphor For Intimacy
      • Meeting the Ghost of Hamlet's Father
      • A Theatrical Journey Through Maine's Lesbian History
      • Tara and Other Lies
      • Teena Brandon's Inconvenient Truth
    • Workshops >
      • The Art of the Dramatic Monologue
      • Acting Lesbian
      • Interrupting Racism: A Workshop
      • Playwriting Techniques for Poets and Fiction Writers
      • Ugly Ducklings Workshop
    • Residencies
    • The Lesbian Tent Revival >
      • Testimonials
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Radio Hour Podcasts
      • The Lesbian Tent Revival Sermon on Dying Well
      • Sermons for a Lesbian Tent Revival
      • Supplemental Sermons
      • Hotter Than Hell
      • The Synapse Pendant
    • Cauldron & Labrys >
      • A Brief History
      • Upcoming Productions
  • Calendar
  • Contact/Storefront
    • Privacy Policy
  • Blog

Black Star: A Play About Henrietta Vinton Davis

Paperback
eBook (PDF)

eBook (EPUB)

Kindle

PictureThe cast of the Maine Playwrights Festival reading with Director Rene Goddess Johnson
  • 2025, staged reading, Lincoln Park Theatre Festival , Margo Albert Theatre, sponsored by Bilingual Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles.
  • 2021, excerpted Put A Woman on a Pedestal, New Shokan Kitchen Island Project, NYC
  • 2020, excerpts included in The Best Men's Monologues from New Plays 2021, and The Best Women's Monologues from New Plays 2021, Applause Books (Rowman & Littlefield) CANCELLED due to pandemic.
  • 2019, Maine Playwrights Festival Reading Series, Portland.
  • 2017, The Chekhov Club of the Barn Arts Collective, Trenton, ME (reading)

In Black Star, the greatest African American classical actress of the 19th Century, Henrietta Vinton Davis, wrestles with a ghost who is calling into question her dedication to Marcus Garvey and his “African Redemption” movement to raise money for an all-Black steamship line that will resettle hundreds of thousands of African Americans in Liberia.  At the age of sixty, she left the stage to devote herself full-time to fundraising and international organizing for Garvey.
 
Henrietta Vinton Davis is backstage in Liberty Hall, Harlem, preparing to introduce Marcus Garvey at the 1924 national convention for Garvey’s legendary organization, UNIA (the Universal Negro Improvement Association). Just as she is about to leave the dressing room, she is interrupted by the intrusive presence of the ghost of Robert Poston, a former UNIA colleague.
 
Earlier in the year, Poston and Davis were part of a UNIA delegation to Liberia, where it became clear that Garvey’s dream of resettlement was impossible. Bitter and disillusioned, Poston succumbed to pneumonia on the return voyage, and now his ghost has now returned to haunt Davis, who is planning to lie about the situation in Liberia and continue to fundraise for the ships.
 
Davis, attempting to throw off this ghostly visitor, conjures various scenes from her long career in theatre where she had to face serious challenges to her success.
 
These flashback vignettes include racist heckling at her debut with Powhatan Beatty at the Ford Theatre in Washington, a scene of domestic violence with her husband/manager in Cincinatti, and her dilemma in opening a theatre in Chicago to compete with the racist 1893 Chicago Exposition.
 
In a tense, climactic scene, Poston takes Davis back to the night he died on the ship, entrusting her with his report. Davis defends herself by revealing a traumatic secret to to Poston. In her final bid to exorcise Poston’s ghost, she returns to the 1923 mail fraud trail of Garvey, where the prosecution’s star witness, a janitor at Penn Station, schools her on the true value of owning stock in the Black Star steamship line.
 
The play is a celebration of an African American actress whose radical choice to avoid vaudeville, minstrel shows, and plantation dramas got her effectively written out of Black theatre history. It’s also an exploration of the controversies that continue to swirl around Marcus Garvey, whose influence on leaders of the Civil Rights era cannot be overestimated. Finally, it is a tribute to the pragmatism of cherishing and propagating a radical dream, and to the activist artists for whom this is their lifework.

 
3 African American woman: 65, 30’s, and 16.
6 African American men: mid-20’s, 75, two mid-30’s, two 40’s.
One male, any race, 20’s.
 (Several male roles can be doubled.)
Single set (a dressing room)
1 hour
 


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.