The March 2000 production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis offered a good cast and a talented director, but it could have been stronger had the Guthrie allotted more rehearsal time—it had only four weeks instead of the six to eight at the other professional productions. The short rehearsal period made it hard for the director to adjust problems of blocking, timing, etc. in such a complex drama. Also, the set design was unfortunate, with the most intimate scenes—in the bedroom and the parlor—situated the furthest away from the audience . . . and that in a 1300-seat house! Overbearing choreography contributed to the alienation and slowed the action instead of accelerating it.

A pleasant surprise was a college production in Oberlin, Ohio in the spring of 1999. Caroline Jackson Smith, a professor of theater there, proved to be a congenial director, utilizing a well thought-out set design to direct a powerful interpretation that, if cast with top-notch professional actors, could have done Broadway proud.

Robert McDowell:

Are you working on another play?

Rita Dove:

I’m always working on several things—poems, a memoir, a novel. I’ve started two theater projects: one is a full-length play, the other an evening of one-acts with interrelated characters. Let’s wait and see.

Three different approaches to teaching and studying Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth around the year 2000

I. Literary Analysis, English 220

Taught by Ann M. Fox, at the time Assistant Professor of English at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina.

One way to read Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth is as an adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. In an essay compare the two, discussing how and why Dove makes this intertextual link. Explore what you think the one or two major themes of Dove’s play are, and why/how she makes use of Sophocles’s play to convey these. Is it effective? Important? In addition, explore the major ways in which Dove’s play differs from the Greek original, and why those differences matter in light of the literary ends you’ve attributed to Dove. Find specific examples that support your conclusions.

The above exam essay might be a good starting point for classes that have already read Oedipus Rex. However, it is important to talk about other issues that branch off from that comparison:

CANONICITY

• Why do you think Dove models her play—a play by an African-American woman, one speaking very specifically to the slave experience in this country—on a canonical work of Greek theater?
• What is the significance of placing her play in dialogue with others that have long been considered “timeless”?
• Does she challenge canonical standards of drama? Revise them? Reinforce them?
• To what extent can this play still be seen as an outgrowth of an African-American tradition of theater in staging and/or theme?
• You might also compare her use of poetic diction to the innovative language used by playwrights like Ntozake Shange, for example.