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Breath, Boom by Kia Corthron

Fourteen years in the life of Prix, a Bronx native, from her ruthless girl-gang leadership at sixteen through her coming to maturity at thirty. But children do not become violent in a vacuum: As a small child Prix was raped by her mother's longtime loverbeing with the family on and off from the time Prix was two until sixteenwhile her mother lived in a blind denial world. Amidst all the brutality Prix is still a kid with her own dreams and delights: fireworks. In the course of the play Prix is locked in teen jail with a lonely outcast, and later in a women's facility with a white woman who thinks she's black Prix comes to face old demons: conversations with the mother's lover, long dead; a chance meeting with a woman who has spent her adult life in a wheelchair because of a confrontation with Prix in their teens; at twenty-eight, an old woman by gang standards, being on the other side of punishment by the fourteen-year-old daughter of a "sister" Prix used to kick around; and ultimately coming to terms with the mother Prix hasn't seen in thirteen years.

Kia Corthron is a fast rising contemporary playwright. Her ability to convey the language and beat of her characters puts her in a class almost by herself, and this is no more evident than in this play. Corthron is often recognized for tackling important subjects, especially since they are topics, and about people, that the theatre (and film, and television, and every other sort of performance) regularly ignore.