Breath, Boom Book

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 lover—being with the family on and off from the time Prix was two until sixteen—while 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.