Square Blues

By Shay Youngblood

Square Blues follows, a reparations activist, his mother Odessa, who married a Jewish store owner in the 1940’s and her grand daughter Karma, an art activist, during one summer weekend in the early 1990’s during which each member of his family is challenged to stand up for their beliefs in ways that threaten to tear the family apart. Three generations in a southern family respond to oppression and injustice and find the courage to stand up for their beliefs as they redefine what makes a family and what holds it together. For many years Square has been collecting names on petitions demanding Black Pay Back, financial reparations and a public apology for slavery and using money inherited from his father to bail out political prisoners and finance a radical underground movement. During the course of the play Square paints a ‘wall of resistance’ mural on the interior wall of the café depicting modern heroes and activists while his niece Karma creates art on public walls using spray paint, nude models and found objects in her art actions to bring attention to the issues she feels passion for, and Odessa is lost in her memories, grieving the loss of a most profound love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shay Youngblood
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301015962

Shay Youngblood

Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris, Winter Prophet, a graphic novel, Black Power Barbie and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories. Her plays, Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and Talking Bones (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Flying Blind, Square Blues and Communism Killed My Dog. An Edward Albee honoree, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, several NAACP Theater Awards, and an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction, Ms. Youngblood graduated from Clark-Atlanta University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the eastern Caribbean, as an au pair, artist's model, and poet's helper in Paris, and as a creative writing instructor in a Rhode Island women's prison. She was a 2011 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission, Creative Artist Fellow. Currently she is a writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art. "My interest in architecture has been fueled by my travels. I have lived on the East Coast, in the Deep South, Japan, Hawaii, France, Spain and the Caribbean, traveled to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Denmark and once took a three month road trip across the United States. I have a particular weakness for shoes and my guilty pleasures are spa vacations and 72 hour reading orgies. I will try almost any cuisine or any activity once, more if I like it. My art practice includes writing and painting, sometimes I combine the two. Among my creative goals are collaborations with a composer on an opera, an illustrator on a graphic novel and to develop an interdisciplinary work for the theater that integrates video animation."

Book preview

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