cover photo by T Charles Erickson
"GENERATIONS imposes itself
upon you with outrageous gestures and bold flights of language.
It may be the most corrosive and unsparing drama to emerge from
the pen of an African-American writer since the angry days of Ed
Bullins and Richard Wesley.
...it is this young man who
provides GENERATIONS with its thematic pivot: Cody Cooper is the
great black hope, the son of a former maid and a one-time hustler
who stashed their hard-earned money away so that their children
could have a better life. He is, in short, the American Dream,
and the ineluctable path of GENERATIONS is that of the dream gone
astray, as Cody's resolve is slowly poisoned and eroded by the
ghetto.
The corruption of the good kid
is the stuff of great American pop mythology, and Cody's
transformation from aspiring actor to gangster can be traced back
to classic docu-melodramas like Caged and I Am A Fugitive From A Chain
Gang. It is a telling measure of what we have come to that
the prison locale of these old movies has changed to a Coney
Island housing project; like these earlier works, GENERATIONS
makes no bones about its social message, pointing a stern,
warning finger at its audience for participating in a system that
creates these ghetto prisons.
...I choose to call it daredevil
playwriting, brimming with the dynamic stage language and
swaggering confidence of a writer in complete control."
Jan Stuart, Newsday
originally produced by the Long Wharf Theater, New Haven CT
4 M, 3 F
I S B N: 0-88145-105-3, $8.95