The Darker Face of the Earth, the first full-length play by Pulitzer Prize winner Rita Dove, is an Oedipal tragedy of interracial love set on a plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina. A brooding and shocking play, it mixes Greek and African mythology to reveal the tragedy of slavery in which black and white Americans are bound together by the chains of history, blood and passion. According to Dove, “The play explores how it is possible to have a society that is so rigid, that has such secrets, that something like the Oedipus legend could happen in this country.” Directed by Kenshaka Ali.
