BULRUSHER

Full length play | Drama | 3M, 3F

In 1955, in the redwood country north of San Francisco, a multiracial girl grows up in a predominantly white town whose residents pepper their speech with the historical dialect of Boontling. Found floating in a basket on the river as an infant, Bulrusher is an orphan with a gift for clairvoyance that makes her feel like a stranger even amongst the strange: the taciturn schoolteacher who adopted her, the madam who runs her brothel with a fierce discipline, the logger with a zest for horses and women, and the guitar-slinging boy who is after Bulrusher’s heart. Just when she thought her world might close in on her, she discovers an entirely new sense of self when a black girl from Alabama comes to town. Passionate, lyrical, and chock full of down-home humor, this play is an unforgettable experience by a new, thrilling voice.

[Bulrusher’s] originality elicits many striking insights, affording a new expressive depth to old ideas of protest and liberation that can usefully be refreshed for contemporary sensibilities. Davis’ voice…registers clearly. The playwright conveys with some welcome complexity the power of many variants of intimacy, with their contending and complementary strands of anger and desire, rebellion and love. Myron Meisel, The Hollywood Reporter


ACCOLADES

Pulitzer Prize Finalist

SELECTED PRESS

Los Angeles Times Review

Hollywood Reporter Review

Bulrusher Playwright Eisa Davis Talks Ferguson and Race

PUBLISHED BY…

Samuel French


ANGELA’S MIXTAPE

Full length play | Drama | 5W

Her mother is a lawyer and activist, her aunt is Angela Davis, but who is she? In this spirited autobiographical comedy, Eisa Davis pays affectionate tribute to her unorthodox upbringing in Berkeley, California. It’s just your average black macrobiotic revolutionary dancing family. But even red-diaper babies want to go to the prom.

The strange juxtaposition of the prosaic trials of adolescence and the urgent radicalism of the family politics is also what gives the show its own distinctive identity. That’s the burden Ms. Davis had to bear, trying to move through the choppy waters of self-discovery while being asked to carry a weighty sense of racial and cultural history. Charles Isherwood, The New York Times


SELECT PRESS

A Best of the Year | The New Yorker

New York Times Review


THE HISTORY OF LIGHT

Full length play | Drama | 2W, 2F

Imagine your father’s college girlfriend tracking you down and sending you a stack of his fervent love letters. But what if you never knew your father–or a true, reciprocal love? A young singer’s life is transformed as her past becomes her present. Swelling with the music of a grand piano, full of the rush of children’s playground games, The History of Light is a passionate fugue between fathers, daughters, lovers, and friends.


SELECT PRESS

Barrymore Nomination for Outstanding New Play


HIP HOP ANANSI

Full length play | Comedy | 6 Actors, at least 1F, 1M

The story of Anansi and his trickster family is put into a sleek, urban hip hop context in this modern adaptation of an Ashanti folktale. Anansi wants the Golden Fly Pie Award for Tricksterism and is not above outwitting his own children to win it. But his rhyming, break dancing, graffiti-ing children are ready to claim the prize in their own right. Who’s fly? Who deserves the pie?


Published…

by Playscripts


CIRQUE DU SOLEIL | CRYSTAL

writer of voiceover text and narration