Robbie McCauley

Sally's Rape is a 45-minute performance art piece from 1991 that played at The Kitchen in New York City.[12] The show was inspired by McCauley's enslaved great-great-grandmother Sally who had a child fathered by her enslaver, the product of sexual violence.[13] 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.[14][15][16] 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."[12] McCauley called the show a "work in progress", a play on words with the social progress she hoped to engender.[17]

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 '60s 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.[18] It toured around the state of Mississippi in 1992,[19] and was presented in New York at the Whitney Biennial in 1993,[5] and Texas in 1996.[20]

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.[21]

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.[22]

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.[23] The premiere performance of the piece was put on by ArtsEmerson, an organization at Emerson College, directed by Maureen Shea.[24] 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."[25]

Indian Blood, like Sally's Rape, weaves McCauley's family history into the piece, using video to allow McCauley to portray multiple characters.[14] First performed in 1987, the play is inspired by McCauley's grandfather. He was a part of the 10th Cavalry Regiment in the Spanish–American War, known as the buffalo soldiers as they also fought Native Americans.[26]

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.[27]

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.[28]

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.[29] This won a IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award for Solo Performance.[30]