Pinkness
The title of Pink an allusion to its controlling imagery. This short but powerful monologue is by a white 10-year-old girl bemoaning the death of her beloved black nanny during a shooting at civil rights protest march. The title refers to the penchant for the little girl to ask the nanny to make a pink cake and the pink cake becomes a symbol for the passage from innocent childhood to conditioned racism.
The Other Side of the Dark
When you begin to think about it, the all-encompassing title of this collection under which these four plays are unified is a phrase not unlike the title of a science fiction movie made fun of by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark on an episode of her show: They Came from Beyond Space. One is tempted to reach a conclusion similar to that made by Elvira: what is on the other side of dark but more and deeper darkness? Of course, the imagery associated with darkness carries far more potential meaning than space so while the space beyond space is just more of the same, the darkness on the other side of the dark is filled the possibilities of various shadings and textures. Every one of the works collected here are concerned with various aspects of “the dark” as representing an existential abyss and as such that darkness on the other side is subjective with not just the meaning differing but the quality of darkness varying.
Breaking Mothers’ Backs
The imagery of the title The Crackwalker is distilled from the literal to the symbolic. The literal reference is to a kind of mythic figure who exhibits extreme obsessive-compulsive traits by walking the sidewalks of the city making sure to never step on a crack. The allusive qualities of this manic obsession is applied as imagery to suggestive of the ways in which we all live lives desperately trying to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk of our existence.
The Vortex
The title of Tornado represents what is likely the most obvious connection to imagery among these plays. Everybody is familiar with a tornado and the swirling vortex of power it creates which is capable of depositing anything standing in its path almost instant to another location. What is especially fascinating about the tornado imagery in Tornado, however, may be that in the transformation from radio drama to stage play, so much is changed. What the tornadic transformation does to everything from character names to setting to theme is being transported from one medium to another is beguilingly representative of the imagery associated with its title.
