If Only We Knew
by Aishah Rahman

MINGUS TAKES (3) consists of three one-acts: SPEAKER’S HEAD, IF ONLY WE KNEW, and UPTOWN!

It is dedicated to Charles Mingus Jr’s ingeniousness, his humor and revolutionary spirit, and his great contribution to American classical music more commonly labeled jazz.

In SPEAKER’S HEAD, a speaker introduces his concepts on America’s “eminent world domain.”

In IF ONLY WE KNEW, An African immigrant in New York describes how he was shot by police.

In UPTOWN!, a drunk tramp named Psyche strikes up a conversation with Opal on the bus.

At first she’s very wary of him.

But gradually Psyche’s penetrating insights begin both to unnerve and intrigue her.“…there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman.

Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays.

Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium.”

—Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University