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Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.
"[An] appropriately turbulent and quite funny show about the forces that influence the forging of identity....the strange juxtaposition of the prosaic trials of adolescence and the urgent radicalism of the family politics is also what gives the show its own distinctive identity."
Eisa Davis is a writer, composer, and performer. A recipient of a USA Artists Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, an AUDELCO, an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance, and the Herb Alpert Award in Theater, Eisa was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play Bulrusher. Along with her thirteen full-length stageworks, she has written for television, recorded two albums of original music, Something Else and Tinctures, and directed a short film, Remembrance. Notable performance work includes Kindred, Mare of Easttown, The Wire, Kings, The Essentialisn’t, the musical of The Secret Life of Bees, and Passing Strange. An alumnus of New Dramatists, Eisa has received residencies, awards, and fellowships from Sundance Theater Lab, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Helen Merrill Foundation, the Van Lier and Mellon Foundations, and Cave Canem. Eisa lives in Brooklyn, NY.