Awarded annually since 1987, the Theodore Ward Prize recognizes the outstanding individual accomplishments of African American playwrights, as well as their growing importance to the shape and direction of American drama in our time. This collection, edited by a director and educator who has been affiliated with the contest for fifteen of its seventeen years, showcases a selection of the award-winning plays and offers a rich and varied view of the best of two decades of evolving African American drama.

These seven plays, which span the Ward Prize's history, represent a wide range of talents, experience, and perspectives brought to bear on diverse themes, from a unique moment in the history of baseball's Negro League to a working-class couple contending with a neighborhood bully; from a child's memories of negotiating desegregation to coming of age amidst the ravages of racism, child abuse, and AIDS. By turns poetic and moving, brave and rousing, uproarious and unsettling, these works written by established and emerging playwrights allow actors, directors, theatergoers, and readers to sample the multifarious dramatic experience being limned by African American playwrights today.

In Smart People, Lydia R. Diamond shows that no matter how well we think we understand the influence of race on human interaction, it still manages to get in the way of genuine communication and connection. This funny and thought-provoking play gives us four characters all associated with Harvard: a young African American actress cleaning houses and doing odd jobs to pay the bills until her recently earned M.F.A. starts to pay off; a Chinese and Japanese American psychology professor studying race and identity in Asian American women; an African American surgical intern; and a white professor of neuroscience with a shocking hypothesis, researching the way that our racial perceptions are formed. As their relationships evolve, the four discover that their motivations and interpretations are not as pure as their wealth of knowledge would have them believe. As in all of her work, Diamond brings a sharp wit and a subtle intelligence to bear on questions that never cease to trouble us as individuals and as a society.

Adept at capturing the experience of the upper-middle-class African-American, Diamond lays out two families' worth of secrets in this precise play. With only six characters, she constructs a vivid weekend of crossed pasts and uncertain but optimistic futures. On Martha's Vineyard, an affluent African-American family gathers in their vacation home, joined by the housekeeper's daughter, who is filling in for her mother. The family patriarch is a philandering physician; one of his sons has followed in his footsteps, while the other, after numerous false starts in a variety of careers, is a struggling novelist. Both bring along their current girlfriends, to meet the family for the first time. With such highly--perhaps over--educated vacationers, the conversation and the barbs fly, on subjects ranging from race to economics to politics. But there is also more than enough human drama, which reaches its climax when an old family secret comes out. Through lively exchanges and simmering wit, the family tackles a history filled with complications both within the family and in the outer world.