Keli Garrett chosen for new anthology of African American theatre

A Goldsmiths, University of London PhD student is one of ten playwrights to be included in the new anthology, ‘Contemporary Plays by African American Women: Ten Complete Works’.

Keli Garrett, PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths and a graduate of both Columbia College and Brown University, wrote ‘Uppa Creek: A Modern Anachronistic Parody in the Minstrel Tradition’ in 1999.

The play, which revolves around a young slave who plots to poison her master and escape from his plantation, premiered in September 2001 at the off-Broadway Dixon Place Theatre in New York, with Garrett – an experienced actress - among the cast.

In her foreword to the publication in ‘Contemporary Plays’, Garrett explains how “America’s collective amnesia regarding four hundred years of institutional slavery continues to mystify. In this play I span and therefore suspend time as we know it, in order to take a closer look at our antecedents and ourselves. I draw parallels between a peculiar past and an oblivious present.”

“Why, as a nation, can we not face and interrogate our collective histories and confront every indignity and indecency in the same way that we embrace every triumphant achievement?”

Northwestern University drama professor Harvey Young describes ‘Contemporary Plays by African American Women’ as a “fascinating collection that brings important but rarely presented perspectives on African American life to the stage … I have a hard time imagining aspiring actresses not having a copy of this book on their bookshelves and mining it for audition material.”

A highly experimental playwright, Keli Garrett’s plays and adaptations, including ‘Funkland’, ‘Red Clay Hills’, ‘TOBAS’, ‘Uppa Creek’, ‘Meridian’ by Alice Walker and ‘Faith and the Good Thing’ by Charles Johnson, have been commissioned and performed across the United States.

Keli joined Goldsmiths in September 2015. Initially attracted by our offering of an MA in Black British Writing, she was encouraged and supported in joining us as a PhD candidate instead by the MA's convenor Dr Deirdre Osborne. With Dr Osborne supervising her PhD, Keli’s now based in London and says she is “enjoying the rigorous work and people of the Goldsmiths’ community”.

Her practice-based PhD centres on the experimental plays of black women writers. “I am endeavouring to define the aesthetic vocabulary rooted in the tradition of the making of these works,” Keli explains. Her research covers the work of writers spanning from the Harlem Renaissance to the present. “I’m rediscovering such American writers as Marita Bonner, Suzi Lori Parks and the UK’s own debbie tucker green, to name a few.”

Keli’s current play, Zebra, will be a part of her creative unit towards her Goldsmiths degree. “It’s a play that deals aesthetically with representation and, content wise, with the reparation of historical relationships between men and women of colour,” she says.

While none of her plays have been performed in the UK so far, Keli’s hoping this will change very soon.

The Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths is distinguished by a strong emphasis – across its diverse range of practical and scholarly work – on the social roles, impact and influence of theatre and performance.

Among the department’s key research areas are the history and theory of theatre, an emphasis on multiculturalism, practice as research, and cross-disciplinary writing and performance.

In 2015, two of the five playwrights shortlisted for the prestigious Bruntwood Prize - selected from some 2,000 entrants - were Goldsmiths alumni.