Love Like Light: Plays and Performance Texts

A reunion not only of Jones's revolutionary work in the course of twenty-five years in the avant-gardes of New York, Austin, and Minneapolis, among others, Love Like Light is also a reunion of collaborators and friends, featuring essays by Vicky Boone, Jacques Colimon, Eisa Davis, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, korde arrington tuttle, Aaron Landsman, Deborah Paredez, and Shay Youngblood and an interview with Faye Price.

A companion volume, Particle and Wave, features a book-length conversation between Daniel Alexander Jones and poet, scholar, and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs about Love Like Light and the way that love, like light, suffuses everything and is the condition and power of change in the world.

PRAISE FOR LOVE LIKE LIGHT:

For me, a memorable person made these plays. Sometimes we forget a writer is first a person. It is a person who created these words. And Daniel Alexander Jones is a person. I remembered him for decades. I first met him when he was a young scholar standing in the lobby of Churchill House at Brown University. So passionate, so gracious--he was like the hero from a play. He came to me and told me he was working on my play The Owl Answers with Rhonda Ross. The play would start in minutes. But he said I was waiting for you. I do want to tell you I read Funnyhouse and it was on my mind for a long time. The production he and Rhonda created was superb. But I always remembered this passionate young man with a heroic manner and grace. And he is the creator of the plays in these pages. As he did then he has a connection like electricity to the word. He totally understands the human issues at the core of theatre and what makes it important to our lives. When a person is unforgettable like that that young scholar was, you sense he is important. And Daniel, his vision, his narratives--he sees beyond the realities. He sees invisible realities. He sees beyond horizons.
-Adrienne Kennedy

Daniel Alexander Jones is a conjurer of the dazzling and the profound. His energetic flights call us to trouble arbitrary boundaries, communalize our celebrations and embrace our natural propensity for light, light, light.
-Aleshea Harris

Daniel Alexander Jone is a poet of mighty theatrical proportions. Seeing his plays is like getting baptized. With depth and mercurial ease, Daniel’s plays and performances widen the human circle and help us see each other more fully. I am so happy to be able to hold Daniel’s plays in my hands in this volume. They are a true gift, particularly during this bleak moment in history. Daniel is a transmitter of light.
-Sarah Ruhl

The words that blaze into my mind when I think of Daniel Alexander Jones are transcendent and transformative. In Daniel's work as a writer, a teacher, a director and a performer, he transcends and transforms reductive and conformational ideas into a liberation which also allows others to transform and transcend...Daniel is a force of nature--a shining star in our often dark skies which glows as bright as a supernova--without having to explode into nothingness. Long may he--and Jomama Jones--shine on us all!
-Morgan Jenness