The Darker Face of the Earth

By Rita Dove

Published to coincide with its British premiere at the Royal National Theatre, The Darker Face of the Earth

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Release date: Sep 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781786823267

Rita Dove

Rita Dove received the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, in 1987, and she served as US Poet Laureate from 1993¬ to 1995. Her drama, The Darker Face of the Earth, opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1996 and the Kennedy Center in Washington in 1997, followed by its European premiere at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1999. Her song cycle, Seven for Luck, with music by John Williams, premiered in 1998, and her 2020 song cycle, A Standing Witness, fourteen poems with music by Richard Danielpour, was sung by Susan Graham at the Kennedy Center in 2021. W. W. Norton published Dove’s latest volume of poems, Playlist for the Apocalypse, in 2021. Rita Dove’s numerous honors include the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2021 Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as the sixteenth—and third female and first African American—poet in the Medal’s 110-year history. She is the recipient of both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts, making her the only poet ever to receive both. To date, she has received twenty-nine honorary doctorates. She teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.

Reviews for The Darker Face of the Earth

[librorumamans · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written, stunning retelling of the Oedipus myth.

[sallylou61 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rita Dove is primarily a poet but has also written a collection of short stories, a novel, and this play which has been performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington in addition to other places. This review is for the completely revised second edition of the play.The Darker Face of the Earth somehow was not quite what I expected although I don’t know what I expected. In some ways it is a classical play since it makes use of a chorus, and some of the characters have classical names. The play takes place on a plantation in South Carolina primarily in 1840 although the Prologue takes place in 1820. The unusual features of this play are that the plantation belongs to a woman who inherited it from her father; her husband does not own or manage it. Moreover, in the Prologue the woman gives birth to a biracial baby boy, whom she agrees to give away. Her husband will no longer have anything to do with her, and spends the rest of the play in his study. Thus, we have a white plantation woman as the central character doing things that are more often associated with men on plantations. The main body of the play is centered around the running of the plantation and of a new male slave's appearing, with whom the female plantation owner spends considerable time. The play ends with a slave revolt and a revealing of relationships.