Biography

Elaine Jackson emerged as a playwright in the 1970s, a socially and politically dynamic moment in the nation's history and a renaissance decade for black theater. Beginning with her early play Toe Jam (1971) and continuing through her later plays of the 1970s and 1980s, Jackson presents a sometimes dark but inevitably celebratory vision of women in the process of confronting their lives and reenvisioning them. She, along with other black female dramatists of the period, working within the unique cultural climate created by the Black Power movement and the women's movement, helped to forge a vitally important theatrical space in which the lives of women of color found not only a stage presence but an authentic voice.

Born in Detroit to Essie and Charlie Jackson, the playwright began her theatrical career as an actress. After attending Wayne State University, where she majored in speech and education, Jackson moved to California to pursue her acting career. She performed in more than forty plays in Michigan, California, and New York (Off-Broadway). 

In 1972, while Jackson was still working as an actress on the West Coast, two of her former theater colleagues from Detroit, Woodie King, Jr., and Ron Milner, published Toe Jam in the Black Drama Anthology, a seminal collection of works by twenty-two black dramatists, including Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Jackson followed with Cockfight (1976), Paper Dolls (1979), and Birth Rites (1987). Her work has met with both public applause and critical recognition. She was the recipient of the Rockefeller Award for Playwriting for 1978–1979 and the Langston Hughes Playwriting Award in 1979. In 1983, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Award for playwriting. (Full Bio)

Plays

TOE JAM (1971)

A mother sacrifices herself and stifles her present so that her two daughters can have a future. The younger daughter is funky and permissive. The other, Xenith, is a dreamer, lost in an imaginary world; she play‐acts her life. She is Cleopatra standing on a kitchen table. Her passport for liberation is a handsome photographer whom the mother regards with total scorn. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 8 (4f, 4m)

Characters: Xenith Graham, Alice Graham, Mother, Martin, Annie, First Man, Second Man, Third Man

Publication: Black Drama Anthology. Edited by Woodie King Jr. and Ron Milner. New American Library (1972). (Link)

PAPER DOLLS (1979) 

Two elderly women who were the first black beauty queens in Boley, Oklahoma, are now being asked fifty years later to judge a beauty contest in Canada.

Cast Requirement: 6 (4f, 2m)

Characters: Margaret-Elizabeth, Lizzie, Woman One, Woman Two, Man One, Man Two

Publication: 9 Plays By Black Women. Edited by Margaret B. Wilkerson. New American Library, 1986. (Link)

UNPUBLISHED

COCKFIGHT (1976)

Cockfight is a battle of the sexes, between a black man and a black woman. Reba, the wife, is considered to be demanding; Jesse, the husband, who is an artist (an author, musician, and a jeweler), does not live up to his wife’s expectations. The couple deals with the fact that this might be the dissolution of their marriage.

Cast Requirement: 5 (3f, 2m)

Characters: Reba, Sampson, Carl, Jesse, Claudia

Publication: N/A

BIRTH RITES (1987)

Birth Rites is about mothers who must undergo Cesarean deliveries in overburdened urban hospitals; these mothers are awaiting the birth of their babies. 

Cast Requirement: 9 (8f, 1m)

Characters: Dr. Jessup, Dr. Rubin, Louise, Perez, Guerra, Ruth, Johnson, Wong, Beaucour

Publication: N/A

PUBERTY RITES…NOT A BOOTLEG EXPERIENCE (2011)

Puberty Rites is a poignant “coming of age” drama. An elemental heritage bonds two girls at the beginning of the 21st Century, Keesha, from her struggling Black world and Vesna, from her White world of physical privilege. Both face emotional poverty as they confront each other and their inherited past and future. Their personal secrets threaten to destroy them and their dreams. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 2 (2f)

Characters: Keesha, Vesna

Publication: N/A