Books by Aishah Rahman

ONLY IN AMERICA is oracular, mythic, wicked satire, with outrageous humor and provocative subject matter. In this play, Aishah Rahman achieves a synthesis of Jazz and secular speech, as she creates a language for America's "invisible women".ONLY IN AMERICA is set in an imaginary Animal Bureau of Civil Rights in Washington DC, and was written, in part, in reaction to Anita Hill's testimony about working with Clarence Thomas.

MINGUS TAKES (3) consists of three one-acts: SPEAKER'S HEAD, IF ONLY WE KNEW, and UPTOWN! It is dedicated to Charles Mingus Jr's ingeniousness, his humor and revolutionary spirit, and his great contribution to American classical music more commonly labeled jazz. In SPEAKER'S HEAD, a speaker introduces his concepts on America's "eminent world domain." In IF ONLY WE KNEW, An African immigrant in New York describes how he was shot by police. In UPTOWN!, a drunk tramp named Psyche strikes up a conversation with Opal on the bus. At first she's very wary of him. But gradually Psyche's penetrating insights begin both to unnerve and intrigue her."...there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman. Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays. Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium." -Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

UNFINISHED WOMEN deals with the events in a home for unwed mothers on the last day of jazz musician Charlie Parker's life, March 12, 1955. The play digs beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teenage mothers."UNFINISHED WOMEN is an underground classic. It reaches beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teen-age mothers ... The title implies the central conceit of the play: the juxtaposition of the Hide-A-Wee Home for Unwed Mothers (the unfinished women) and Pasha's boudoir, where Charlie Parker (the 'Bird'), the brilliant black saxophonist of years past, spent his last days. Many types of girls find themselves in this home: the child of middle-class upbringing who got 'caught'; the innocent who was raped; the savvy, street-smart girl who let the music make love to her, as well as the strict nurse who turned her illegitimate child into a 'niece.' Charlie Chan, that stereotype of Oriental inscrutability, presides over all, a comment on the power of images in our society. The play focuses on that moment when the girls must decide whether to keep their babies or to give them up for adoption. Despite their fantasies of rescue by 'caring' young fathers, they must decide alone. Meanwhile, Bird slowly dies in the plush boudoir of his longtime mistress, trapped in a narcotic fog and the lost dreams of his exploited talent." -From Margaret B Wilkerson's introduction to the play in 9 Plays by Black Women

Subtitled "a light and dark skin comedy," CHIAROSCURO is set on a cruise ship peopled by black singles where "pretty" means light-skinned, and all the men are dark, and Papa Legba, the African trickster spirit, is disguised as a ship steward."... there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman. Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays. Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium." -Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University