Emboldened by the 1960’s Black Arts Movement, Yvette X stakes her claim as a female dramatist coming of age artistically, racially and politically during the ongoing fight for parity for women in the American Theatre. Against the backdrop of the 1960’s, Bridge to Baraka is the journey of the daughter of an absentee Black Muslim father and a bourgeois Baptist mother, who flees the margins of the black experience in America to challenge long-held beliefs that she “is not black enough to recite a black poem.” All roads lead to the recitation of “the seminal poem of the Black Arts Movement,” Amiri Baraka’s incendiary, Black Art. At the heart of this play is a message that people of all stripes, especially women theatre artists, can take a page from: We are the beneficiaries of a short-lived, explosive and controversial, literary movement which empowers America’s melting pot to tell their own stories, their own way, and to get those stories to the masses “by any means necessary!”
