Variations On Living In America

-- J.T. Rogers

"The Overwhelming" premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2006 and ran in New York last year. Rogers's previous plays include "White People" and "Murmuring in a Dead Tongue."

Lydia R. Diamond, "Stick Fly"

A passionate debate on race and class erupts among members of an upper-crust African American family and their guests at the family's Martha's Vineyard retreat. The power of lighter or darker skin tone to affect one's fate fuels a subplot in this dramedy.

" What defines elite in the black community is SO not connected to money. People often say there are so many issues in the play . . . it's just the landscape of being African American in this country. . . . If I seem overly passionate about it, it's because I think it's misunderstood when in a family play the talk turns to race and class. Because it's not something that HAS to be discussed in a white family."

-- Lydia R. Diamond

"Stick Fly" premiered in 2006 at Chicago's Congo Square Theatre Company and has been performed at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., and by L.A. Theatre Works, where it was recorded for public radio. Diamond, who teaches at Boston University, also wrote the fact-based tragedy "Voyeur de Venus," about a 19th-century African woman who was abducted and carted around Europe as an exhibit. Her much-praised adaptation of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" was done by Theater Alliance in 2006.

Richard Dresser, "A View of the Harbor"

In this last installment in the darkly comic "Pursuit of Happiness" trilogy about class, the young scion of an old-money family has been working at a factory, trying to escape his roots. He and his nouveau-riche girlfriend (who thinks she's slumming) visit his father and sister, who live like eccentric paupers in the family's beach house, and soon "the awesome power of the family" reels the son back in.