Generations of the Dead in the Abyss of Coney Island Madness
by Michael Henry Brown

Described by the New York Times as "a threatening portrait of urban insanity.

A drug lord is king, corruption is endemic and parents instill offspring with perverse values.

In Mr Brown's Coney Island, everything is for sale."

"GENERATIONS imposes itself upon you with outrageous gestures and bold flights of language.

It may be the most corrosive and unsparing drama to emerge from the pen of an African American writer since the angry days of Ed Bullins and Richard Wesley … it is this young man who provides GENERATIONS with its thematic pivot: Cody Cooper is the great black hope, the son of a former maid and a one-time hustler who stashed their hard-earned money away so that their children could have a better life.

He is, in short, the American Dream, and the ineluctable path of GENERATIONS is that of the dream gone astray, as Cody's resolve is slowly poisoned and eroded by the ghetto.

The corruption of the good kid is the stuff of great American pop mythology, and Cody's transformation from aspiring actor to gangster can be traced back to classic docu-melodramas like Caged and I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang.

It is a telling measure of what we have come to that the prison locale of these old movies has changed to a Coney Island housing project; like these earlier works, GENERATIONS makes no bones about its social message, pointing a stern, warning finger at its audience for participating in a system that creates these ghetto prisons … I choose to call it daredevil playwriting, brimming with the dynamic stage language and swaggering confidence of a writer in complete control."

—Jan Stuart, Newsday