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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 812.54 DOV | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The Darker Face of the Earth, the first full-length play by Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove, is an Oedipal tragedy of interracial love set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina. The play has enjoyed staged readings on Broadway and full stage productions at the Kennedy Center and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This completely revised second edition coincided with the 1996 world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Dramatic readings of The Darker Face of the Earth were initially staged on Broadway. "Poet Laureate Dove has done an amazing thing...her placement of the tale of Oedipus within the context of slavery and its open secret of miscegenation is brilliant, potent, and repercussive."-Booklist (starred review) "...a brooding and in some ways shocking piece that mixes Greek and African mythology and dramatic communication to reveal the tragedy of slavery."-The Christian Science Monitor "The play not only reminds the audience of history's relevance to the present day, but it also allows a deeper understanding of how slavery's cost continues to exact its cruel payments...The Darker Face of the Earth is an important play."-World Literature Today "Dove has created a drama in which black and white Americans are bound together not only by the chains of history, and not only by the necessity of sharing this land, but by ties of blood and passion as well."-Detroit Free Press
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
McDowell unites two renascences in American poetry by writing a long narrative poem in a regular form, blank verse. The English language likes blank verse, and the first pleasure we take in this book is with the way the iambs surge forward: one-TWO, one-TWO, one-TWO . . . But McDowell is every foot the contemporary poet, and his plain vocabulary soon shunts attention to his story, that of a dysfunctional middle-class American family. In each of five chapters, McDowell relates the most crucial developments in one decade (1950s through 1990s) of the shared lives of Al and Eleanor and their son, Tom. The whole poem resembles a very good novel-in-stories by some minimalist prose fictionist, but it shares the drawbacks--painfully sketchy characterization and colorless material description--of much minimalism, which McDowell somewhat offsets with his personae's dreams and fantasies. Although the long poem is commonly supposed to induce immediate boredom, The Diviners is good enough to make us wish for more--more detail, more color, more authorial daring. (Reviewed August 1995)1885266197Ray Olson
