Book of Anger: A Suite in Five Voices

By J. M. Wilson

The feminist scholar Kate Millet wrote that women are hungry to have their unspoken voices heard and to finally know the stories of their sisters and mothers throughout time. Author J. M. Wilson has sought out the sound of that voice, the Voice of a Woman, and in her groundbreaking play Book of Anger she feeds that hunger of women around the world to listen and be heard.

In Book of Anger, true artist of womens theater, storytelling and poetic prose, J .M. Wilson delivers an uncompromising view of the abuses and survival of females from childhood to womanhood. The shocking reality of the social casting of women as victims is challenged by her tales of womens inherent spiritual valor. Not merely a histrionic harangue, but a seductive melody of hope, Book of Anger tells the story of deliverance from the futile hopelessness of the victim to the passionate living woman who rises unconquered despite the attempted murder of her soul. In the tradition of Ntozake Shanges, For Colored Girls .... J.M. Wilson has created a landmark piece of poetry in the round.

The craft and power of Book of Anger affirms the belief that there is still an audience for brutally realistic fiction as opposed to the manufactured products of reality that we are inundated with today. For Wilson makes it clear that, in the words of noted playwright Anna Deavere Smith, these stories, are not offered as truths but as fictions that attempt to tell other truths, the kinds of truths that live in fiction and in the imaginary worlds.

Book of Anger fiercely questions bigotry based on color, race, sexuality, and gender, in extraordinarily evocative language and imagery to repay the reader and viewers attention. This latest edition of Wilsons play features an introduction by award winning poet and Womens historian, Patricia Monaghan (acclaimed author of Goddesses and Heroines) making Book of Anger a work not to be missed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469137643

J. M. Wilson

Writer and scholar, J. M. Wilson’s earlier plays include Crib and 52nd Street: A Night of Storytelling and Jazz. In addition to her own plays she has directed the works of other contemporary playwrights such as Ira Jeffries’ Samson and Delilah Brown and Robert Kornfeld’s Father New Orleans. J. M. is a graduate of DePaul University and holds an MA in Folkloristics and Oral Tradition from Union Institute and University. She lives and works in New York City writing short stories and creative nonfiction. She is a regular contributor to numerous publications.Tradition from Union Institute and University. She lives and works in New York City writing short stories and creative nonfiction. She is a regular contributor to numerous publications.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by J. M. Wilson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2011962752

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4691-3763-6

         Softcover      978-1-4691-3762-9

         Ebook         978-1-4691-3764-3

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Portions of this play have appeared in the publications: Woman Magazine and Dark Starr under the titles The Girl Who Could Only Drink Tears & The Woman That Never Learned to Cry and The Black Wedding Dress.

CAUTlON: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Book of Anger is subject to a royalty. The play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth) and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations.

All rights, including professional and amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecture, public reading, radio broadcast, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

All inquiries concerning English language stock and amateur performing rights in the United States and Canada and any other inquiries should be directed to the author’s representative: Green Griot NY, P. O. Box 7040, New York, NY 10150 or e-mail [e-mail].

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

74049

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Production Notes

CHARACTERS

ACT I

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three

Scene Four

Scene Five

Scene Six

Scene Seven

Scene Eight

Scene Nine

ACT II

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three

Scene Four

Scene Five

Scene Seven

Scene Eight

AFTERWORD

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

With Honour, Love and Respect

To my mother, Lee Anna Wilson and all

Our Mothers who in their own ways stayed silent so that tonight

We could scream.

INTRODUCTION

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? the poet Muriel Rukeyser famously asked, providing her own answer: The world would split open.

She wrote those words in 1968, before the contemporary Women’s Movement emerged from the period’s other civil rights movements. The heritage of those words of that time is amplified in J. M. Wilson’s Book of Anger, which explores much more than the titular emotion and its cousins: rage, resentment, indignation, and outrage. Love is here as is dependency, hatred and envy, joy and fear. Unnamed women embody these emotions, but more importantly, they weave stories about them—vivid, unforgettable narratives like that of the unwilling bride who poisons her groom with a kiss, or of the girl who lives by drinking tears. These are stories that split open the world with truthfulness.

But the speakers of these words are not characters in the conventional dramatic sense, because their identities merge and tangle as they unveil their dream-like stories. A couple of centuries ago, Book of Anger would be immediately recognized as closet drama, a term now mostly fallen out of use. So, mostly, has the poetic drama itself. Stage dialogue today trends away from poetry into the starkest vernacular, when it is not erased by mute action.

But as H. A. Beers notoriously argued fifty years ago, The playhouse has no monopoly on the dramatic form. Romantic and early modern writers found the closet drama a flexible and expressive form, a poem in dialogue in Brander Matthews’s definition. One of the greatest works of the German theater, Goethe’s Faust (Parts 1 and 2), was conceived as a closet drama although it has long since become standard theatrical fare. The closet drama was a staple of the Romantic period, with contributions from Byron and Shelley expanding the form’s philosophical and poetic possibilities. But eventually the more prosaic speech of Ibsen and Shaw overtook the stage as T. S. Eliot lamented in 1922 when he berated the public’s failure to recognize that legitimate craving . . . which only the verse play can satisfy.

Critic Marta Straznicky argues that women writers found poetic or closet drama especially suitable, for it allowed them to create gestures of detachment and exclusion appropriate to an ambiguously private-public discourse. Such drama requires a different engagement of the reader-viewer than does conventional theater. This form was appealing to women, Straznicky argues, because closet drama is an essentially political statement, invested in examining power and its abuses. But the form is also poetic, demanding that we attend to sound and imagery while simultaneously struggling with complex (perhaps unanswerable) social and interpersonal questions.

Wilson revivifies and revitalizes this literary form in the intensely personal and poetic Book of Anger, which can be (and has been) staged but as readily can be enjoyed by the solitary reader. In this, she joins such poets as Americans Annie Finch and David Wisehart and former English poet laureate Andrew Motion. The plays crafted by the new breed of closet dramatists defy the simple division into page or stage. On stage, they