Robbie McCauley

Robbie Doris McCauley (July 14, 1942 – May 20, 2021) was an American playwright, director, performer, and professor. McCauley is best known for her plays Sugar and Sally's Rape, among other works that addressed racism in the United States and challenged audiences to participate in dialogue with her work. She also performed in Ntozake Shange's 1976 Broadway play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. McCauley was professor emerita at Emerson College, teaching there from 2001 until she retired in 2013.

Early life Robbie McCauley was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on July 14, 1942. and later an M.A. from New York University. The experience inspired her to develop work about her own life. She described her ambition for her work: "that people might be able to have a good time with material that's charged and uncomfortable."

In addition to her theater work, McCauley taught at City College of New York, Hunter College, Mount Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts.

Notable works Sally's Rape Sally's Rape is a 45-minute performance art piece from 1991 that played at The Kitchen in New York City. In one portion of the piece, McCauley stands naked on a bench. A white woman enters and tells the audience that the bench is an auction box and encourages the audience to bid on McCauley's body—something McCauley described as a ritual intended to engage the audience with her in addressing the historical experience of African-American women who were objects of white abuse, and opening a dialogue with the audience. Reviewing the show for The Village Voice, Alissa Solomon found this objective successful: "Unlike typical attempts at audience participation, we weren't being manipulated or coerced. Instead, we were being drawn into a rehearsal, practice for a bigger project that, we understood, would have to continue outside. And, thrillingly, it did. For a couple of hours after the performance, I talked about racism with friends who'd also been at the show, looking into areas I'd never before dared to open. I can't remember the last time I left a play more filled with its questions." McCauley called the show a "work in progress", a play on words with the social progress she hoped to engender.

Trilogy Mississippi Freedom is the first in a trilogy of theater works that McCauley created in the 1990s that highlight race relations in the US during the 1960s and '70s; this work dealt with the struggle to win voting rights. In collaboration with Arts Company as well as local artists who had personal ties to the voting rights movement, the pieces are mixed media, incorporating elements of music, audience participation, inviting viewers to stay after the show to discuss with the cast. It toured around the state of Mississippi in 1992, and was presented in New York at the Whitney Biennial in 1993, and Texas in 1996.

Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White, second in the trilogy, was centered around the Boston school busing controversy. After a year spent developing a show via interviews conducted around Boston, in the style of Anna Deavere Smith, Turf was performed in four different neighborhood locations around Boston in 1993.

The last piece in the trilogy is titled The Other Weapon, and tells the stories of the Black Panther Party, community empowerment, and law enforcement in Los Angeles. It was shown at four locations in LA in 1994.

Sugar Sugar (debuted in 2012) is based on McCauley's life with juvenile diabetes, belatedly diagnosed in her twenties. McCauley describes as well as demonstrates (even drawing her own blood or pausing to inject insulin) the difficulties and complexities of living with diabetes as a black woman working in the theater. She connects the subject to slavery, through the image of sugar cane. Created later in her career, it also engages themes of sex and aging; "How silent are we women about sex after a certain age?" she asks. The premiere performance of the piece was put on by ArtsEmerson, an organization at Emerson College, directed by Maureen Shea. Reviewing the play's premier, Don Aucoin of The Boston Globe describes McCauley as "a skilled performer and raconteur who knows the subtle difference between speaking with—rather than to or at—her audience."

Other works Indian Blood, like Sally's Rape, weaves McCauley's family history into the piece, using video to allow McCauley to portray multiple characters.

Persimmon Peel was a collaboration with fellow For Colored Girls alum Laurie Carlos, "a cryptic, often poetically allusive little work" performed in Minneapolis in 1990. The two performers, reviewed as "riveting", shared fragmentary stories and memories, building up a depiction of Black life in the United States.

McCauley performed Love and Race in the United States Revisited as a work-in-progress in Hartford in 1999, soon after joining the faculty of Trinity College.

McCauley performed Jazz'n Class as her part of Badass, an evening of new works, with Magdalena Gómez and Kate Snodgrass, produced at Boston Playwrights' Theatre in 2015. This won a IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance.

Awards For Sugar: IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance (2013) For Jazz'n Class: IRNE Award for Solo Performance (2016)

Personal life In 1979, McCauley married Ed Montgomery, a musician, and they had a daughter, composer Jessie Montgomery. The cause was congestive heart failure. She was aged 78.