Play a Day: How Blood Go

Lisa Langford

Twenty plays in twenty days. Like most people, I feel the days are only melting into each other.

For Monday, I read How Blood Go by Lisa Langford and posted at New Play Exchange.

Lisa's work is poetic and comic and cutting and brilliantly outlandish.

Last fall I had the pleasure of seeing the premiere of Rastus & Hattie, which was inspired by the Westinghouse "Rastus Robot" from the 1930s. Did you know Westinghouse built a prototype robot for attending to housework ... and gave it African features?

That part is true. Langford took this concept to extradordinary lengths; I wouldn't call it Afrofuturism but rather Afrohistoricism, bending time and space to satirically comment upon the African American experience.

With How Blood Go she takes studies into how black patients are treated poorly as compared to white patients by the medical establishment, and weaves it into a broader historic context.

The character Quinntasia visits her friend Did in the hospital, and goes about making her comfortable in the absence of proper care by the medical staff. "We take care of everybody," Quinntasia laments. "Who take care of us?"

While my mother was dying, she was looked after by a team of compassionate caregivers. Mostly women, mostly African American women. If black women didn't show up, America would collapse entirely.

Who should I read tomorrow?