Testimonies: Four Plays

Emily Mann is one of a handful of contemporary playwrights rediscovering and redefining the art of the historical drama. The four plays in this new paperback personalize, with growing surety and power, the Holocaust (Annulla), the Vietnam War (Still Life), the assassination of San Francisco's mayor and openly gay supervisor (Execution of Justice), and the 1979 North Carolina riot in which an anti-Klan rally turned into a Klan killing spree (Greensboro: A Requiem). Mann always keeps the issues at flesh-and-blood level. Her plays take us on a tour of the hearts of both her heroes and her villains, which has the power to make them that much more heroic and villainous. Her sympathies may be left-wing, but her right-wing characters are never cartoons and her leftists are rarely unalloyed saints. All are written from the gut outward. She shows that such outsize characters don't belong just to the past. Once we look through her eyes, we can see these people walking among us every day.