Biography

Robbie McCauley was a playwright, director, and performer who was an active presence in the American avant-garde theatre for several decades. One of the early cast members of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway, McCauley went on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country and abroad. Her play Sally's Rape won the 1991 Obie Award for Best New American Play and a Bessie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance. Other notable works include Sugar, Indian Blood, Mississippi Freedom, Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White, The Other Weapon, and Quabbin Dance.

McCauley was a recipient of the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance, and was selected as a 2012 United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellow. Her work has been widely anthologized, including the volumes Extreme Exposure, Moon Marked and Touched by Sun, and Performance and Cultural Politics.

Striving to facilitate dialogues on race between local white and Black people, she created the Primary Sources series in Mississippi, Boston, and Los Angeles, produced by The Arts Company. In 1998, her “Buffalo Project” was highlighted as one of “The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments” by the Village Voice, a roster including work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage.

Robbie McCauley taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, Boston College, Emerson College, and New York University Tisch School of the Arts. (Source)

Plays

CONFESSIONS OF A WORKING CLASS BLACK WOMAN; OR FAMILY STORIES (PART 2): INDIAN BLOOD (1987)

Indian Blood surrounds Robbie's Native-American great grandfathers' participation in the genocide of his own people. He was a part of the 10th Cavalry Regiment (United States) in the Spanish-American War. They were known as the buffalo soldiers, as they also fought Native Americans. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 1 (1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: The Struggle Continues: Robbie McCauley: Scripts, Essays, & Reflections. Edited by Alisa Solomon, Elin Diamond, and Cynthia Carr. Theatre Communications Group, 2022. (Link)

CONFESSIONS OF A WORKING CLASS BLACK WOMAN; OR FAMILY STORIES (PART 3): SALLY’S RAPE (1989)

In Sally’s Rape, Robbie McCauley and Jeannie Hutchins, a white performer, collaborate in a highly visual, nonlinear narrative of the life of McCauley’s great-great-grandmother Sally, a slave who was raped by her white master solely to breed cheap field hands. By openly negotiating in their performance a variety of tense physical and discursive spaces constituted by their racial and cultural differences, McCauley and Hutchins challenge spectators to do the same with the play itself: to confront, in personal terms, their relationships to both the represented and actual histories of the rape of an African American slave woman. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 2 (2f)

Characters: Robbie McCauley, Jeannie Hutchins, Audience

Publication: Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African-American Women. Edited by Sydné Mahone. Theatre Communications Group, 1994. (Link)

SUGAR (2006)

Sugar is an auto-biographical piece about McCauley's life as a diabetic. McCauley presents the difficulties and complexities of living with diabetes as a black woman working in the theater and elsewhere.

Cast Requirement: 1(1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: The Struggle Continues: Robbie McCauley: Scripts, Essays, & Reflections. Edited by Alisa Solomon, Elin Diamond, and Cynthia Carr. Theatre Communications Group, 2022. (Link)

JAZZ’N CLASS (2015)

Jazz’n Class explores McCauley’s relationship with her daughter, composer Jessie Montgomery.

Cast Requirement: 1(1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: The Struggle Continues: Robbie McCauley: Scripts, Essays, & Reflections. Edited by Alisa Solomon, Elin Diamond, and Cynthia Carr. Theatre Communications Group, 2022. (Link)

UNPUBLISHED

CONFESSIONS OF A WORKING CLASS BLACK WOMAN; OR FAMILY STORIES (PART 1): MY FATHER AND THE WARS (1985)

My Father and the Wars encompasses stories about Robbie's family and especially her father, a black man who was in every branch of the armed forces. It is a play dealing with race and class and how it has affected us in the past and present. (Link)*

Cast Requirement: 1 (1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: N/A

THE BUFFALO PROJECT (1990)

The Buffalo Project is an intense and remarkably intimate recounting of the Buffalo riots that took place on the city's East Side in June 1967. (Source)*

Cast Requirement: N/A

Characters: N/A

Publication: N/A

TRILOGY (PART 1): MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM (1992)

The first in the series, Mississippi Freedom, focused on the voting rights struggle. It was made in close collaboration with local artists and grew out of stories collected from the local communities. (Source)

Cast Requirement: 1 (1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: N/A

TRILOGY (PART 2): A CONVERSATIONAL CONCERT IN BLACK AND WHITE (1993)

Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White centers around the Boston school busing controversy from 1974-1988. It was made in close collaboration with local artists and grew out of stories collected from the local communities.

Cast Requirement: 1(1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: N/A

TRILOGY (PART 3): THE OTHER WEAPON (1994)

The Other Weapon tells the stories of the Black Panther Party, community empowerment, and law enforcement in Los Angeles. It was made in close collaboration with local artists and grew out of stories collected from the local communities.

Cast Requirement: 1 (1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: N/A

LOVE AND RACE IN THE UNITED STATES REVISITED: “A LECTURE IN PROGRESS” (1999)

love and race in the united states revisited, begins with a reminiscence from childhood: a Fourth of July picnic in the 1950s South during which two of her aunts argued over whether it was appropriate for young Robbie to wear red shorts. But the performance soon jumps to other forms of address–a “professor of race” giving a lecture, a friend talking intimately about a romance that failed. Yet as McCauley ranges among anecdotes, declarations, historical information, and what she calls “more academic” remarks, the tacit questions embedded in the aunts’ argument hover like the summer humidity: How does a black woman’s sexuality get expressed and interpreted? Can she control it? Can she have romance untainted by the cultural assumptions layered onto her body? What kind of love is possible, and can it include white men? (Source)

Cast Requirement: 1(1f)

Characters: N/A

Publication: N/A

RESOURCES