Moon Marked and Touched By the Sun: Plays By African American Women.

Sydne Mahone, ed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. 448 pp. $15.95.

Moon Marked and Touched by the Sun: Plays by African American Women is a provocative text in which eleven Black female playwrights boldly release their spiritual as well as political voices. The anthology is masterfully organized by its editor, Sydne Mahone, who also contributes an impressive introduction to the project. Playwrights ranging from Adrienne Kennedy to Thulani Davis construct characters who deploy rich languages using verbal speech and gestures. Newly emerging artists like Kia Corthron and Suzan-Lori Parks recognize that physical and mythical spaces provide significant meanings for their plays' characters. Furthermore, it is refreshing to see Mahone, by including an excerpt from ntozake shange's stage adaptation to her novel The Resurrection of the Daughter: Liliane, refusing to lock the author of for colored girls ... into the late seventies, where she has been imprisoned by scholars and artists. While Mahone describes shange's contribution to the anthology as an "evolution of the choreopoem," she has chosen each of the eleven contemporary playwrights for the "stylistically fresh" ways in which they address a multitude of crises facing Black women.

Although Mahone, in large part, uses her introduction briefly to illuminate the ways in which these playwrights participate in numerous-critical discourses, she also includes a forthright critique of the American theatre industry's treatment of Black women's voices. She concludes that, even though these playwrights' dramatic narratives are representative of the innovative and excellent caliber of work being created by Black women, the mainstream theatre industry remains a white patriarchal institution hostile to Black women. "To the commercial and nonprofit producer alike, artistic risk represents an inflation of financial risk." Mahone also suspects that many Black theatres have adopted the conservatism of these mainstream theatres. She asserts that all struggling Black theatre institutions must adopt more radical artistic and funding strategies if they are to survive.

Mahone obviously favors artists whose work transcends rigid traditional standards. The title Moon Marked and Touched by the Sun, explains Mahone, is taken from the late poet Audre Lorde's A Woman Speaks. "Moon Marked" is described by Mahone as the shifting of Black women's consciousness; one who is moon-marked is not only involved in the process of reshaping her "form and narrative," but is also committed to "recompos[ing] the fractured self." In particular, societal margins are sites of resistance where these playwrights confront racial and sexual oppressions:

If we place these playwrights, along with all other playwrights, in a

circle, then there is no margin. Each writer claims her space on the

continuum of the dramatists who play a dynamic role in the evolution of the

artform, using it as a tool for the transformation of human consciousness.

Mahone further asserts that, because these Black female playwrights are "Touched by the Sun," they are finding their own voices while simultaneously "speak[ing] for the silent ones" and "listen[ing] for the ancestral whisper as they carve new forms."

Mahone admits that the telephone interviews she conducted with each playwright were simply intended to "create introductions for each work"; however they do much more. Mahone has explicitly given these artists space to speak in their multiple tongues. By including excerpts from the interviews, Mahone is further recognizing the writers' identities as artists and theorists. Though there are occasionally striking similarities in the ways these playwrights define heroism or explain the responsibility of the theatre artist, each excerpt is unique.

Laurie Carlos's interview and her play White Chocolate for My Father are the first selections in the anthology. Carlos recounts the painful memory of being sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, and she reveals that writing has allowed her to talk about the cycle of abuse and violence within her family. Carlos also notes that, in identifying her pain and her shame via White Chocolate, she is able to move "through the next moment in [her] voice." Carlos claims she gains access to a place in the world where her identity is no longer defined merely by abuse.

The late Danitra Vance uses the television talk show format in her one-woman show Live and In Color!. Emphasizing the coexistence of seriousness and comedy, Vance raises questions in the final interview of the anthology about the ways in which Black women survive. Despite Black women's position at the bottom of society's totem pole, she concludes that it is the presence of the comedic form that makes her better able to get at the truth of how Black women see the world.

Likewise, in Judith Jackson's one-woman performance piece WOMBman WARs, she deploys comedic voices in order to probe the ways in which sexism coupled with racism has contributed to the silencing of Black women in living rooms, kitchens, tents, churches, hotel rooms, Senate hearings, and even inside the womb. The 1991 Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas spectacle figures prominently in the piece, allowing Jackson to address more explicitly the role of the media in the silencing of Black women. It impossible to find one fixed theme or language in Jackson's work, because she deploys multiple masks throughout her narrative. However, Jackson makes it clear that she "wanted to demonstrate that there are wars that go on within women. Our wars start in our wombs." In particular, Jackson's young character Danisha is affected by the inner wars of her mother Sapphire. While the couple Danny and Sapphire struggle with the death of the child they think they lost, they fail to understand their daughter Danisha's own desire to be noticed as a full human with a voice. Jackson is among the few playwrights who have given adequate attention to a Black girl child's voice. When Danisha's male playmate disrespects her, she verbally and physically answers back by fighting. However, her father orders Danisha to her room because he "hates to see little girls fight." When others continue to ignore her greatness, Danisha repeatedly reminds herself, "I'm bad, I'm bad." She constantly seeks ways for her fearlessness to survive and, in so defending herself, to challenge the values of ladylike behavior. Through the daily struggles of the girl child Danisha and a series of other characters, Jackson re-emphasizes Anita Hill's own persecution during the Senate Confirmation Hearings. One might argue that Jackson has given the girl child the title of hero within and beyond the setting of home.

Like Jackson, Kia Corthron astutely recognizes that one's consciousness about who one is and who one is not is determined, in part, by the physical spaces in which that person exists. Corthron's Cage Rhythm is set in a women's prison. In one scene, Corthron places characters in a phone room where they stand in line to interrogate their lawyers, order toiletries, and steal brief moments with their children. Using the phone is a complicated act for these prisoners, who must fight one another for this time and space. The prisoners' feelings of impatience and desperation on the phone line come from their desire to remain connected to voices, to spaces beyond the prison walls. Physical and mythical spaces allow or deny the characters the opportunity to mourn and to recompose their fractured selves.

In the introduction to Audre Lorde's 1984 collection of essays and speeches Sister Outsider, Nancy K. Bereano states that "Lorde's commitment to confront the worst so that she is freed to experience the best is unshakeable." Mahone embraces Lorde's commitment to a Black feminist project that asks us to trust those voices that have been battered or those voices that we never knew existed. Mahone contends that these voices must move to unexplored octaves and that it is impossible to theorize about transformed voices without recognizing the interconnectedness of intellectual work and spirit work. She locates her mother at the center of her dramaturgical point of view.

Moon Marked and Touched by the Sun is keenly edited and an invaluable source. This anthology deserves particular attention from diverse theatre companies and from instructors and students of theatre and drama, women's studies, and African American studies. All who experience it will be compelled by the ways in which Mahone and these playwrights rescue silences with such creative rigor.