About the Play:

Winner of the 1971 Drama Desk Award.

Black Girl is a full-length drama by J.E. Franklin. This eloquent and affecting play tells the story of Billie Jean, the baby of the family, who is a high school dropout with talent and the desire to become a dancer, and of her family's attempt to thwart her advancement. Black Girl is a deceptively simple play that addresses interracial oppression, family dynamics, choices, and becoming with rare honesty, revealing insights and a fresh, disarming humour.

Black Girl tells the story of a young girl who defies the low expectations thrust upon her by her family and pursues her dream of becoming a dancer. Trapped in a life that can lead nowhere, Billie Jean has dropped out of school and secretly taken a job as a dancer in a local bar, her ultimate goal being to become a ballet dancer. But her ambitions bring her into conflict with her envious sisters, both of whom have been locked into dreary marriages too early, and her mother, who has given up on her own children and now lavishes her care and affection on her "foster daughters" – industrious girls to whom she has transferred her own frustrated hopes. Billie Jean must fight a multiplicity of prejudices – family, sex, colour, class and economic – to win an education and forge her own identity. But with her grandmother's strength and trust to embolden her, Billie Jean breaks free, establishing at last a tenuous but hopeful relationship with her mother and taking the first sure steps toward a life that will, at least, be of her own making.

Black Girl premiered in 1971 at Theatre de Lys in New York City by the Henry Street Settlement's New Federal Theatre, the Off-Broadway company which has long fostered the work of African-American and women playwrights and actors. It ran for an entire season and each performance opened to a full and enthusiastic house, winning a Drama Desk Award as best play of the 1971-72 season. In 1984, The McGinn-Cazale Second Stage Theater in New York City produced Black Girl as part of its series on American Classics, staring a young Angela Bassett.

Cast: 6 female, 2 male, 2 children (1 girl, 1 boy)

What people say:

"…a skillfully drawn domestic drama, moving in its simplicity…an inspirational play to truly exceptional quality." — Variety

"…a forceful and important new voice." — New York Post

"…Miss Franklin has a compelling sense of language, a nice way with humor, and a dramatic vitality that demands an emotional response." — Cue Magazine

"Far deeper and more devastating than the usual run of family plays, because of the writer's incisive simplicity and her gift for seeing her characters in the found... Franklin goes right past the decorative byways and distractions which are the excess baggage of art. The nonjudgmental simplicity of her writing is the source of its greatness." — The Village Voice

"The action is so natural, real, you feel you're peeling back your neighbor's curtains and peering through. The scenes are simple yet daring and boldly etched." — New Amsterdam News

About the Playwright:

Born Jennie Elizabeth Franklin, known professionally as J.E. Franklin, is an African-American playwright. After receiving her B.A. from the University of Texas, she made her way to New York and began to make work for the theatre during the Black Arts Movement of the mid-1960s. She is the founder and producing artistic director of Blackgirl Ensemble Theater, located in the historic Sugar Hill district of Harlem. The matriarch of Black playwriting, her most well-known play, Black Girl, is considered the progenitor of the current Black Girl movements in its exploration of the issues and experiences of young womanhood.