Publisher's Synopsis
Drama, Drama, Drama: Plays Straight Outta Oakland is a book for actors, drama students, and classrooms, with plays, useful rehearsal warmup exercises, audition monologues, and scene study. It utilizes a wide variety of languages--standard English, Ebonics, slang, cursing and code-switching. This selection, written by Judy Juanita from 1986-2023, includes one-act plays that have been produced, studied, and staged in theaters and venues throughout the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, LA, NYC, Winston-Salem, NC, and at many universities and colleges.
"The Art of Benevolence" combines four satirical vignettes that push the limits of kindness, running time: 70 minutes.
- First vignette, "Samaritan-ism" a young woman with a vulgar name, Mercy F**k, finds out about rudeness and charitable intentions as she goes through airports and the protocols of traveling from London to NYC.
- Second vignette, "The Art of Benevolence" a daughter comes home reluctantly to visit her ailing Irish-American mother and encounters her mother's spirit guide.
- Third vignette, "The History of Sweat" a farce about fragrance, funk, advertising, and subways throughout the world.
- Fourth vignette, "New York, New York, It's a Helluva of a Town" Students at Columbia University trick a professor into using the N word.
"Counter-Terrorism" takes on a homeless truth-teller who invades the mind of an educated shopaholic after 9/11. Two versions are included, one 60 minutes running time, and an abridged version running 10+ minutes.
"Wait Just A Goddam Minute: A Fat Drama in the Space of a Working Lunch" is a 10-minute play in which two characters (big, black women or BBW) talk about fat.
"A Moment of Silence" is a one-act play of the absurd, running time: 40 minutes. A distraught nurse's teenage son has overdosed causing her to fall head over heels in love with a duck.
Monologues brings in other voices, including an ex-slave, and utilizes narratives from the plays, including Ann, the homeless truth-teller.Suitable for scene study, auditions, warmup exercises.
