Underground Monroe and The Mamalogues

LISA B. THOMPSON; FOREWORD BY E. PATRICK JOHNSON; INTERVIEW WITH JOAN MORGAN
This book features new plays by Lisa B. Thompson, author of Single Black Female. In these three plays, the black feminist playwright and scholar thoughtfully explore themes such as the black family, motherhood, migration, racial violence, and trauma and its effect on black people from the early twentieth century to the present. The works showcase Thompson’s subversive humor and engagement with black history and culture through the lens of the black middle class.

The thriller Underground explores the challenges of radical black politics among the black middle class in the post-Obama era. Monroe, a period drama about the Great Migration, depicts the impact of a lynching on a family and community in 1940s Louisiana. The Mamalogues, a satirical comedy, focuses on three middle-class black single mothers as they lean in, stress out, and guide precocious black children from diapers to college in a dangerous world. This collection will be compelling to readers interested in African American studies; drama, theater, and performance; feminist and gender studies; popular culture and media studies; and American studies.

Reviews

“Underground is more than a play. It's a powerful weapon of change—a truth bomb that will get conversations started.” —T. Lynn Mikeska, Austin Chronicle

“Monroe is a wonderful new play that contains charming characters, witty dialogue and an examination of the horrific effects of racial terrorism in a way that entertains while it educates..” – Frank Benge, Broadway World

“The Mamalogues . . . treats [motherhood] in a way that everyone can recognize . . . Sisters in the BBSM—Black Bougie Single Mothers—are here to share, and in this case, that can be fun. But alongside ‘bougie’ and ‘mothers’ in the support group's name are the words ‘single’ and ‘black,’ and they carry a weight that must be acknowledged. Thompson does so in dramatic moments that live side by side with the comic ones, just as it happens in life.” —Robert Faires, The Austin Chronicle

“The lushness of Lisa B. Thompson’s singular theatrical imagination is on full display in this dazzling trio of plays. Writing with remarkable urgency, creativity, humor, and humanity, Thompson crafts complex characters, and worlds that affirm and invite us to delight in the beauty of black life.” —Isaiah Matthew Wooden, coeditor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration

“We expect our storytellers to bring truth to the madness, and the stage has been where so much of that madness has been scripted in life-sized proportions. Lisa B. Thompson understands this better than most, and with her new collection, Underground, Monroe, and The Mamalogues, she captures the magic, trauma, and most importantly, the humor and laughter of Black life, and offers us a lifeline to the could-have-beens and should-have-beens that we can take for our own.” —Mark Anthony Neal, author of Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

Available for purchase from all booksellers.

Single Black Female

Single Black Female is a two-woman show with rapid-fire comic vignettes that explore the lives of thirty-something African American middle class women as they search for love, clothes and dignity in a world that fails to recognize them amongst a parade of stereotypical images. SBF 1, an English literature professor, and SBF 2, a corporate lawyer, keep each other balanced as they face their fears of rejection, hopes for romance and reminisce about black girlhood wounds. While embodying a variety of characters, the girlfriends discuss the absurdities of interracial dating, the lure of recreational shopping and the merits of college reunions for bolstering one’s self-esteem. After reviewing their escapades in past relationships and confessing their own mounting anxieties about commitment and the possibility of motherhood, the pair realize their best chance at love may be found closer than they ever imagined.

Nominated for a 2004 L.A. Weekly Theater Award for Best Comedy!

Reviews

“A socially significant and very entertaining two-woman show that manages to be simultaneously self deprecating and proud.” – The New York Times

“Fresh...hugely entertaining theater.” – Variety

“Perfectly suited for the post-Sex and the City woman.” – Backstage

“Thompson stands her stereotypes on their heads, to apt and funny effect. These right-on feminist sisters want equal rights and equal pay, but they also yearn for steamy romance and Jimmy Choo shoes, not necessarily in that order.” – The Los Angeles Times

“A bracing, funny, bittersweet...show that is both bigger than life and wondrously small, with plenty of notes in between.” – L.A. Weekly

Canada Fringe Festival production

Available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Samuel French, Inc.

Beyond the Black Lady

Received an honorable mention for the National Women's Studies Association's Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, 2010.

In this book, Lisa B. Thompson explores the representation of black middle-class female sexuality by African American women authors in narrative literature, drama, film, and popular culture, showing how these depictions reclaim black female agency and illustrate the difficulties black women confront in asserting sexual agency in the public sphere. Thompson broadens the discourse around black female sexuality by offering an alternate reading of the overly determined racial and sexual script that casts the middle class "black lady" as the bastion of African American propriety. Drawing on the work of black feminist theorists, she examines symptomatic autobiographies, novels, plays, and key episodes in contemporary American popular culture, including works by Anita Hill, Judith Alexa Jackson, P. J. Gibson, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Jill Nelson, Lorene Cary, and Andrea Lee.

“[Thompson] finds that some Black women are pioneering new ways to be and to give voice to a more fully actualized, human, female persona. This new woman is long overdue.”
— Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

"In refreshingly clear prose, Lisa B. Thompson renders a complex and nuanced reading of black middle-class women from both fiction and real life. This study makes an important intervention in the discourse on what has heretofore been an under-theorized subject."
— E. Patrick Johnson
author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South

"A path-breaking, cogently argued, bold study of the ways in which black women writers and public figures have engaged, confronted, resisted, or overturned prevailing notions of black middle-class women's sexuality. This book makes a powerful contribution to debates in race studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, and literary and cultural studies."
— Valerie Smith
author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings

Available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and University of Illinois Press