21st-Century Retreats from Realism: Genre Crossings between Poetry and Drama in born bad, The Lamplighter and Is God Is

This chapter explores contemporary genre experiments in three twenty-first-century plays by Black women writers from Britain and the United States, who are united across space and time by their interest in Black women’s life worlds and, especially, by their use of poetic drama. Adopting a genre-theoretical approach, we will show how debbie tucker green’s born bad (2003), Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter (2008), and Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is (2018) make use of genre crossings between poetry and drama to highlight the deeply traumatic experiences of their Black female protagonists. tucker green’s family drama lyricizes dramatic speech in order to address incest in a Black British family, Kay’s radio play uses poetical repetitions to dramatize the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, while Harris’s script for the eclectic revenge tragedy Is God Is experiments with typography and mise en page to depict how twin sisters take revenge on their father for having mutilated them when they were younger. In each of these works, the poetic form serves to expand and replace conventionally realist modes of dramatic representation in moments of crisis, enabling the authors to simultaneously render their characters' traumatization and problematize the (im)possibility of representing trauma on stage.