Stick Fly

Adept at capturing the experience of the upper-middle-class African-American, Diamond lays out two families' worth of secrets in this precise play. With only six characters, she constructs a vivid weekend of crossed pasts and uncertain but optimistic futures. On Martha's Vineyard, an affluent African-American family gathers in their vacation home, joined by the housekeeper's daughter, who is filling in for her mother. The family patriarch is a philandering physician; one of his sons has followed in his footsteps, while the other, after numerous false starts in a variety of careers, is a struggling novelist. Both bring along their current girlfriends, to meet the family for the first time. With such highly--perhaps over--educated vacationers, the conversation and the barbs fly, on subjects ranging from race to economics to politics. But there is also more than enough human drama, which reaches its climax when an old family secret comes out. Through lively exchanges and simmering wit, the family tackles a history filled with complications both within the family and in the outer world.

LYDIA R. DIAMOND is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow and resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists. Her plays include The Gift Horse (anthologized in Seven Black Plays), Voyeurs de Venus, The Inside, and Stage Black. Her adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye premiered at the Steppenwolf Theatre and won the Black Arts Alliance Image Award for best new play. Lydia has taught at Columbia College Chicago, DePaul University, and Loyola University. She is currently on the faculty at Boston University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.