Contemporary African-American women playwrights will have their say on Cincinnati alternative stages this season.

        Kia Corthron, Dael Orlandersmith, Suzan-Lori Parks and Charlayne Woodward are award-winning poets whose stage work will be seen here for the first time in fully staged productions.

Suzan-Lori Parks

        A lot of it is about growing up. Most of it is about the harrowing choices that have to be made by those who live in the inner-city.

        These writers push boundaries. Ms. Corthron invents her own language of the theater; Ms. Parks has made a career out of re-examining American history through African-American eyes.

        All of this work speaks to issues significant in Cincinnati today.

        In chronological order:

        • The Gimmick by Dael Orlandersmith, Oct. 27-Nov. 12, Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. The Gimmick is about the tools people use for getting through life in Harlem in the 1960s and '70s.

        In this one-woman tour de force “Alexis” stands in for Ms. Orlandersmith in this autobiographical drama about groping toward adolescence surrounded by drugs and alcoholism and hampered by being overweight.

        Alexis dreams about art even as she lives her life without illusions.

        “By the time she is through telling the story of the pain that has passed down in this family from one generation of woman to the next, the anger she walks on follows the audience out of the theater and into the night,” wrote the New York Times.

        • Pretty Fire by Ms. Woodward, Jan. 16-25, Know Theatre Tribe. Ms. Woodward also writes an autobiographical one-woman show about a girl's passage, but hers is a happier life guided by a big, wise, loving family.

        Three generations are explored in a series of vignettes that take her character from infancy to age 11. They balance family love with things they can't protect her from, like a child's first brush with racism.

        Pretty Fire won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards and the NAACP Theatre awards for best play and playwright.

        The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, “. . . when dramatic stories are well-told and worth telling, they are magical empathy generators. . . . They can make us care about one person's life, transforming the personal into the universal.”

        • Breath, Boom by Ms. Corthron, April 2-5, Ensemble Theatre Off-Center series. Girl gangs are the topic and Ms. Corthron follows the fortunes of leader Prix over 14 years, beginning when she is a 16-year-old, already hardened gangsta.

        Boom is about urban desperation, cycles of violence and how, when hope stays alive, pipe bombs can be transformed into fireworks.

        • In the Blood by Ms. Parks, May 22-June 15, Cincinnati Shakespeare. This year's Pulitzer Prize winner (for Topdog/Underdog) re-invents Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter with Blood, which was introduced to Cincinnati audiences last season as a staged reading by Theatre of the Mind.

        This Hester is a homeless mother of five whose life is a sort of nightmare Alice in Wonderland adventure of racial, gender and social injustice.

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